English

Quasi-Stationary Distributions and Resilience: What to get from a sample?

Probability 2020-06-22 v4 Populations and Evolution

Abstract

We study a class of multi-species birth-and-death processes going almost surely to extinction and admitting a unique quasi-stationary distribution (qsd for short). When rescaled by KK and in the limit K+K\to+\infty, the realizations of such processes get close, in any fixed finite-time window, to the trajectories of a dynamical system whose vector field is defined by the birth and death rates. Assuming that this dynamical has a unique attracting fixed point, we analyzed in a previous work what happens for large but finite KK, especially the different time scales showing up. In the present work, we are mainly interested in the following question: Observing a realization of the process, can we determine the so-called engineering resilience? To answer this question, we establish two relations which intermingle the resilience, which is a macroscopic quantity defined for the dynamical system, and the fluctuations of the process, which are microscopic quantities. Analogous relations are well known in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics. To exploit these relations, we need to introduce several estimators which we control for times between logK\log K (time scale to converge to the qsd) and exp(K)\exp(K) (time scale of mean time to extinction).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1906.05635,
  title  = {Quasi-Stationary Distributions and Resilience: What to get from a sample?},
  author = {J. -R. Chazottes and P. Collet and S. Martínez and S. Méléard},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.05635},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

This is, up to layout details, the published version (2020) in the Journal de l'\'Ecole polytechnique. See https://jep.centre-mersenne.org/item/JEP_2020__7__943_0/