UNLABELLED In this paper, we propose a five-parameter lifetime model called the McDonald exponentiated gamma distribution to extend beta exponentiated gamma, Kumaraswamy exponentiated gamma and exponentiated gamma, among several other models. We provide a comprehensive mathematical treatment of this distribution. We derive the moment generating function and the rth moment. We discuss estimation...

In vivo cortical neurons are known to exhibit highly irregular spike patterns. Because the intervals between successive spikes fluctuate greatly, irregular neuronal firing makes it difficult to estimate instantaneous firing rates accurately. If, however, the irregularity of spike timing is decoupled from rate modulations, the estimate of firing rate can be improved. Here, we introduce a novel c...

We study the stationary distribution of the number of busy servers in a GI/GI/∞ system in which the service-time distribution is identical to the interarrival-time distribution, and obtain several representations for the variance. As a result we can verify an expression for the variance, conjectured by Rajaratnam and Takawira (IEEE Trans. Vehicular Technol. 50 (2001) 954-970), when the common d...

In modeling internet traffic there have been little attention on skewness. Shifted gamma distribution is a simple traffic model which is long-range dependent and its marginal distribution exhibits specific skewness. Using this model, we give some analytical results on the impact of skewness on the queueing performance such as mean delay and overflow probability. We also investigate the feasibil...

Heterogeneity is an important property of any population experiencing a disease. Here we apply general methods of the theory of heterogeneous populations to the simplest mathematical models in epidemiology. In particular, an SIR (susceptible-infective-removed) model is formulated and analyzed when susceptibility to or infectivity of a particular disease is distributed. It is shown that a hetero...

SEIR epidemiological models with the inclusion of quarantine and isolation are used to study the control and intervention of infectious diseases. A simple ordinary differential equation (ODE) model that assumes exponential distribution for the latent and infectious stages is shown to be inadequate for assessing disease control strategies. By assuming arbitrarily distributed disease stages, a ge...