English

Minimal clade size in the Bolthausen-Sznitman coalescent

Probability 2013-03-07 v2 Populations and Evolution

Abstract

This article shows the asymptotics of distribution and moments of the size XnX_n of the minimal clade of a randomly chosen individual in a Bolthausen-Sznitman nn-coalescent for nn\to\infty. The Bolthausen-Sznitman nn-coalescent is a Markov process taking states in the set of partitions of {1,,n}\left\{1,\ldots,n\right\}, where 1,,n1,\ldots,n are referred to as individuals. The minimal clade of an individual is the equivalence class the individual is in at the time of the first coalescence event this individual participates in.\\ The main tool used is the connection of the Bolthausen-Sznitman nn-coalescent with random recursive trees introduced by Goldschmidt and Martin (see \cite{goldschmidtmartin}). This connection shows that Xn1X_n-1 is distributed as the number MnM_n of all individuals not in the equivalence class of individual 1 shortly before the time of the last coalescence event. Both functionals are distributed like the size RTn1RT_{n-1} of an uniformly chosen table in a standard Chinese restaurant process with n1n-1 customers.We give exact formulae for these distributions.\\ Using the asymptotics of MnM_n shown by Goldschmidt and Martin in \cite{goldschmidtmartin}, we see (logn)1logXn(\log n)^{-1}\log X_n converges in distribution to the uniform distribution on [0,1] for nn\to\infty.\\ We provide the complimentary information that lognnkE(Xnk)1k\frac{\log n}{n^k}E(X_n^k)\to \frac{1}{k} for nn\to\infty, which is also true for MnM_n and RTnRT_n.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1301.2908,
  title  = {Minimal clade size in the Bolthausen-Sznitman coalescent},
  author = {Fabian Freund and Arno Siri-Jégousse},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1301.2908},
  year   = {2013}
}