title: Sustained oscillations in stochastic systems.
abstract: Many non-linear deterministic models for interacting populations present damped oscillations towards the corresponding equilibrium values. However, simulations produced with related stochastic models usually present sustained oscillations which preserve the natural frequency of the damped oscillations of the deterministic model but showing non-vanishing amplitudes. The relation between the amplitude of the stochastic oscillations and the values of the equilibrium populations is not intuitive in general but scales with the square root of the populations when the ratio between different populations is kept fixed. In this work, we explain such phenomena for the case of a general epidemic model. We estimate the stochastic fluctuations of the populations around the equilibrium point in the epidemiological model showing their (approximated) relation with the mean values.
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Física, Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales, Universidad de Buenos Aires, 1428 Buenos Aires, Argentina. jpa9@cornell.edu
authors.forename: J P
authors.initials: JP
authors.lastname: Aparicio
authors.forename: H G
authors.initials: HG
authors.lastname: Solari
mesh_terms: D008954:Models, Biological; D011157:Population Dynamics; D013269:Stochastic Processes