THE COALESCENT STRUCTURE OF CONTINUOUS-TIME GALTON-WATSON TREES

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Harris, Simon C.; Johnston, Samuel G. G.; Roberts, Matthew I.
• 署名单位: University of Auckland; University College Dublin; University of Bath
• 刊物名称: ANNALS OF APPLIED PROBABILITY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1050-5164
• DOI: 10.1214/19-AAP1532
• 发表日期: 2020
• 页码: 1368-1414
• 关键词: genealogy; models

摘要

Take a continuous-time Galton-Watson tree. If the system survives until a large time T, then choose k particles uniformly from those alive. What does the ancestral tree drawn out by these k particles look like? Some special cases are known but we give a more complete answer. We concentrate on near-critical cases where the mean number of offspring is 1 + mu/T for some mu is an element of R, and show that a scaling limit exists as T -> infinity. Viewed backwards in time, the resulting coalescent process is topologically equivalent to Kingman's coalescent, but the times of coalescence have an interesting and highly nontrivial structure. The randomly fluctuating population size, as opposed to constant size populations where the Kingman coalescent more usually arises, have a pronounced effect on both the results and the method of proof required. We give explicit formulas for the distribution of the coalescent times, as well as a construction of the genealogical tree involving a mixture of independent and identically distributed random variables. In general subcritical and supercritical cases it is not possible to give such explicit formulas, but we highlight the special case of birth-death processes.