A Nonidentifiability Aspect of the Two‐Stage Model of Carcinogenesis

Abstract

This paper discusses identifiability of the two-stage birth-death-mutation model of carcinogenesis. It is shown that the homogeneous version of the model is nonidentifiable; the same is all the more evident for its nonhomogeneous versions. This result implies that the model parameters cannot be uniquely estimated from time-to-tumor observations.