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Some large deviations in Kingman's coalescent

Probability 2014-06-24 v2

Abstract

Kingman's coalescent is a random tree that arises from classical population genetic models such as the Moran model. The individuals alive in these models correspond to the leaves in the tree and the following two laws of large numbers concerning the structure of the tree-top are well-known: (i) The (shortest) distance, denoted by TnT_n, from the tree-top to the level when there are nn lines in the tree satisfies nTnn2nT_n \xrightarrow{n\to\infty} 2 almost surely; (ii) At time TnT_n, the population is naturally partitioned in exactly nn families where individuals belong to the same family if they have a common ancestor at time TnT_n in the past. If Fi,nF_{i,n} denotes the size of the iith family, then n(F1,n2++Fn,n2)n2n(F_{1,n}^2 + \cdots + F_{n,n}^2) \xrightarrow{n\to \infty}2 almost surely. For both laws of large numbers we prove corresponding large deviations results. For (i), the rate of the large deviations is nn and we can give the rate function explicitly. For (ii), the rate is nn for downwards deviations and n\sqrt n for upwards deviations. For both cases we give the exact rate function.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1311.0649,
  title  = {Some large deviations in Kingman's coalescent},
  author = {Andrej Depperschmidt and Peter Pfaffelhuber and Annika Scheuringer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1311.0649},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

14 pages, 3 figures. Replaced with revised version. Using a connection to self-normalized large deviations in Theorem 2 the exact rate function could be computed

R2 v1 2026-06-22T02:00:19.511Z