The Erlang distribution approximates the age distribution of incidence of childhood and young adulthood cancers.

ABSTRACT:

Background

It is widely believed that cancers develop upon acquiring a particular number of (epi) mutations in driver genes, but the law governing the kinetics of this process is not known. We have previously shown that the age distribution of incidence for the 20 most prevalent cancers of old age is best approximated by the Erlang probability distribution. The Erlang distribution describes the probability of several successive random events occurring by the given time according to the Poisson process, which allows an estimate for the number of critical driver events.

Methods

Here we employ a computational grid search method to find global parameter optima for five probability distributions on the CDC WONDER dataset of the age distribution of childhood and young adulthood ca

SUBMITTER: Belikov AV 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8351573 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature