Abstract
Extinction is certain in a Galton-Watson (GW) branching process if the o↵spring mean µ < 1, whereas explosion is possible but not certain if µ > 1. Discriminating between these two possibilities is a well-studied hypothesis-testing problem. However, deciding whether extinction or explosion will occur for the current realization of the process is a prediction problem. This can be formulated as a di↵erent testing problem by considering the conditional distributions of the process given extinction and explosion respectively. For power series o↵spring distributions, fixed-sample and sequential parametric tests are presented for the prediction problem and illustrated with data on the spread of epidemics and the populations of endangered species.
