title: Simulation of Mathematical Models in Genetic Analysis
Creators: name: Patel, Dinesh Govindal
Publisher: name: Utah State University
Year: 1964

description: In recent years a new field of statistics has become of importance in many branches of experimental science. This is the Monte Carlo Method, so called because it is based on simulation of stochastic processes. By stochastic process, it is meant some possible physical process in the real world that has some random or stochastic element in its structure. This is the subject which may appropriately be called the dynamic part of statistics or the statistics of "change," in contrast with the static statistical problems which have so far been the more systematically studied. Many obvious examples of such processes are to be found in various branches of science and technology, for example, the phenomenon of Brownian Motion, the growth of a bacterial colony, the fluctuating numbers of electrons and protons in a cosmic ray shower or the random segregation and assortment of genes (chemical entities responsible for governing physical traits for the plant and animal systems) under linkage condition. Their occurrences are predominant in the fields of medicine, genetics, physics, oceanography, economics, engineering and industry, to name only a few scientific disciplines. The scientists making measurements in his laboratory, the meteriologist attempting to forecast weather, the control systems engineer designing a servomechanism (such as an aircraft or a thermostatic control), the electrical engineer designing a communication system (such as the radio link between entertainer and audience or the apparatus and cables that transmit messages from one point to another), economist studying price fluctuations in business cycles and the neurosurgion studying brain wave records, all are encountering problems to which the theory of stochastic processes may be relevant. Let us consider a few of these processes in a little more detail. In statistical physics many parts of the theory of stochastic processes were developed in correlation with the study of fluctuations and noise in physical systems (Einstein, 1905; Smoluchowski, 1906; and Schottky, 1918). Consequently, the theory of stochastic processes can be regarded as the mathematical foundation of statistical physics. The stochastic models for population growth consider the size and composition of a population which is constantly fluctuating. These are mostly considered by Bailey (1957), Bartlett (1960), and Bharucha-Reid (1960). In communication theory a wide variety of problems involving communication and/or control such as the problem of automatic tracking of moving objects, the reception of radio signals in the presence of natural and artificial disturbances, the reproduction of sound and images, the design of guidance systems, the design of control systems for industrial processes may be regarded as special cases of the following general problem; that is, let T denote a set of points in a time axis such that at each point t in T an observation has been made of a random variable X(t). Given the observations [x(t), t ϵT] and a quantity Z related to the observation, one desires to from in an optimum manner, estimates of, and tests of hypothesis about Z and various functions h(Z).