English

The coalescent point process of branching trees

Probability 2015-03-17 v3

Abstract

We define a doubly infinite, monotone labeling of Bienayme-Galton-Watson (BGW) genealogies. The genealogy of the current generation backwards in time is uniquely determined by the coalescent point process (Ai;i1)(A_i; i\ge 1), where AiA_i is the coalescence time between individuals i and i+1. There is a Markov process of point measures (Bi;i1)(B_i; i\ge 1) keeping track of more ancestral relationships, such that AiA_i is also the first point mass of BiB_i. This process of point measures is also closely related to an inhomogeneous spine decomposition of the lineage of the first surviving particle in generation h in a planar BGW tree conditioned to survive h generations. The decomposition involves a point measure ρ\rho storing the number of subtrees on the right-hand side of the spine. Under appropriate conditions, we prove convergence of this point measure to a point measure on R+\mathbb{R}_+ associated with the limiting continuous-state branching (CSB) process. We prove the associated invariance principle for the coalescent point process, after we discretize the limiting CSB population by considering only points with coalescence times greater than ε\varepsilon.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1101.2241,
  title  = {The coalescent point process of branching trees},
  author = {Amaury Lambert and Lea Popovic},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1101.2241},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/11-AAP820 the Annals of Applied Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aap/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org)