Estimation in branching processes with restricted observations

We consider an epidemic model where the spread of the epidemic can be described by a discrete-time Galton-Watson branching process. Between times n and n + 1, any infected individual is detected with unknown probability π and the numbers of these detected individuals are the only observations we have. Detected individuals produce a reduced number of offspring in the time interval of detection, and no offspring at all thereafter. If only the generation sizes of a Galton-Watson process are observed, it is known that one can only estimate the first two moments of the offspring distribution consistently on the explosion set of the process (and, apart from some lattice parameters, no parameters that are not determined by those moments). Somewhat surprisingly, in our context, where we observe a binomially distributed subset of each generation, we are able to estimate three functions of the parameters consistently. In concrete situations, this often enables us to estimate π consistently, as well as the mean number of offspring. We apply the estimators to data for a real epidemic of classical swine fever. © Applied Probability Trust 2006