On the Use of Residence Time Moments in the Statistical Analysis of Age-Dependent Stochastic Compartmental Systems

Most of the present compartmental modeling and analysis found in the applied literature is based on a classical deterministic formulation (1–4). An alternative stochastic formulation has developed rapidly in the mathematical modeling literature (5–7), but the practical application of this formulation to experimental data analysis has developed at a much slower pace. Two recent reviews have now shown that the stochastic model may be useful in practical applications for several reasons related to the statistical analysis of data (8,9).