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Research Report SRR95-019

On the simulation of biological diffusion processes

Henry C. Tuckwell and Petr Lansky

Abstract: Many phenomena of interest in biology can be modeled using diffusion processes satisfying a stochastic differential equation. A stochastic differential equation, representing a population growth process, is simulated using both a strong Euler scheme and a weak scheme. It is found that there are no significant differences between the results obtained at a particular value of the time step, but that the weak scheme only takes about 20% of the CPU time taken by the strong scheme. It is concluded that in the majority of simulations of biological diffusion processes it is advantageous to employ a scheme involving Bernoulli rather than Gaussian random variates because it involves far fewer machine arithmetic operations.


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