Fractional Poisson processes and their representation by infinite systems of ordinary differential equations

Abstract

Fractional Poisson processes, a rapidly growing area of non-Markovian stochastic processes, are useful in statistics to describe data from counting processes when waiting times are not exponentially distributed. We show that the fractional Kolmogorov-Feller equations for the probabilities at time t can be representated by an infinite linear system of ordinary differential equations of first order in a transformed time variable. These new equations resemble a linear version of the discrete coagulation-fragmentation equations, well-known from the non-equilibrium theory of gelation, cluster-dynamics and phase transitions in physics and chemistry.