Armitage–Doll model is a statistical model of carcinogenesis proposed in 1954 by Peter Armitage and Richard Doll, in which cancer arises through a series of discrete heritable mutational events within a single cell lineage. The model was motivated by the observation that the age-specific incidence of many epithelial cancers increases with approximately the fifth or sixth power of age, a relationship that could be explained if carcinogenesis requires k sequential mutations, each occurring at a constant rate.

Under the Armitage-Doll framework, if each mutational step occurs at a constant rate independent of age, then cancer incidence should increase proportionally to age raised