Genealogical structures under interactive neutral reproduction: factorial moment duality via a Frankenstein process
Abstract
We establish a genealogical framework for an existing analytical moment duality between a Wright--Fisher type SDE and a counting process with interaction. To achieve this, we construct a finite-population Moran model featuring interactive neutral reproduction as a novel mechanism. In the corresponding events, an individual, regardless of its own type, can only reproduce if a randomly encountered partner is of the ``fit'' type. This Moran model has a relatively simple counting process as its factorial moment dual, whose genealogical meaning appears to be cryptic: after all, the line-counting process of the natural genealogical process of the model, namely the ancestral influence graph (AIG), exhibits a complex hierarchical structure not reflected in the factorial moment dual. Since moment duality is a property in expectation, we are allowed to systematically remove information from the AIG and merge different realizations of the ancestry. We call the result the \emph{Frankenstein process}. Based on this, we establish the factorial moment duality from a genealogical perspective. The moment duality in the diffusion limit follows in a natural way.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2605.02499,
title = {Genealogical structures under interactive neutral reproduction: factorial moment duality via a Frankenstein process},
author = {Ellen Baake and Fernando Cordero and Hannah Dopmeyer},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.02499},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
44 pages, 13 figures