English

Galton-Watson Probability Contraction

Probability 2016-01-08 v2

Abstract

We are concerned with exploring the probabilities of first order statements for Galton-Watson trees with Poisson(c)Poisson(c) offspring distribution. Fixing a positive integer kk, we exploit the kk-move Ehrenfeucht game on rooted trees for this purpose. Let Σ\Sigma, indexed by 1jm1 \leq j \leq m, denote the finite set of equivalence classes arising out of this game, and DD the set of all probability distributions over Σ\Sigma. Let xj(c)x_{j}(c) denote the true probability of the class jΣj \in \Sigma under Poisson(c)Poisson(c) regime, and x(c)\vec{x}(c) the true probability vector over all the equivalence classes. Then we are able to define a natural recursion function Γ\Gamma, and a map Ψ=Ψc:DD\Psi = \Psi_{c}: D \rightarrow D such that x(c)\vec{x}(c) is a fixed point of Ψc\Psi_{c}, and starting with any distribution xD\vec{x} \in D, we converge to this fixed point via Ψ\Psi because it is a contraction. We show this both for c1c \leq 1 and c>1c > 1, though the techniques for these two ranges are quite different.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1512.07371,
  title  = {Galton-Watson Probability Contraction},
  author = {Moumanti Podder and Joel Spencer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1512.07371},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

This revised version includes two figures, and more detailed proofs of some theorems and lemmas

R2 v1 2026-06-22T12:16:29.524Z