English

Increasing paths in regular trees

Probability 2013-11-14 v2 Quantitative Methods

Abstract

We consider a regular nn-ary tree of height hh, for which every vertex except the root is labelled with an independent and identically distributed continuous random variable. Taking motivation from a question in evolutionary biology, we consider the number of simple paths from the root to a leaf along vertices with increasing labels. We show that if α=n/h\alpha = n/h is fixed and α>1/e\alpha > 1/e, the probability there exists such a path converges to 1 as hh \to \infty. This complements a previously known result that the probability converges to 0 if α1/e\alpha \leq 1/e.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1305.0814,
  title  = {Increasing paths in regular trees},
  author = {Matthew I. Roberts and Lee Zhuo Zhao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1305.0814},
  year   = {2013}
}

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Version published at http://ecp.ejpecp.org/article/view/2784 in Electronic Communications in Probability

R2 v1 2026-06-22T00:11:13.697Z