English

Branching processes with immigration in atypical random environment

Probability 2020-10-21 v2

Abstract

Motivated by a seminal paper of Kesten et al. (1975) we consider a branching process with a geometric offspring distribution with i.i.d. random environmental parameters AnA_n, n1n\ge 1 and size -1 immigration in each generation. In contrast to above mentioned paper we assume that the environment is long-tailed, that is that the distribution FF of ξn:=log((1An)/An)\xi_n := \log ((1-A_n)/A_n) is long-tailed. We prove that although the offspring distribution is light-tailed, the environment itself can produce extremely heavy tails of the distribution of the population size in the n-th generation which becomes even heavier with increase of n. More precisely, we prove that, for any n, the distribution tail P(Zn>m)\mathbb{P}(Z_n > m) of the nn-th population size ZnZ_n is asymptotically equivalent to nF(logm)n\overline{F}(\log m) as mm grows. In this way we generalize Bhattacharya and Palmowski (2019) who proved this result in the case n=1n=1 for regularly varying environment FF with parameter α>1\alpha >1. Further, for a subcritical branching process with subexponentially distributed ξn\xi_n, we provide the asymptotics for the distribution tail P(Zn>m)\mathbb{P}(Z_n>m) which are valid uniformly for all nn, and also for the stationary tail distribution. Then we establish the "principle of a single atypical environment" which says that the main cause for the number of particles to be large is a presence of a single very small environmental parameter AkA_k.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2007.13507,
  title  = {Branching processes with immigration in atypical random environment},
  author = {Sergey Foss and Dmitry Korshunov and Zbigniew Palmowski},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2007.13507},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

20 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-23T17:25:46.961Z