English

The genealogy of a sample from a binary branching process

Probability 2017-10-09 v1 Populations and Evolution

Abstract

At time 0, start a time-continuous binary branching process, where particles give birth to a single particle independently (at a possibly time-dependent rate) and die independently (at a possibly time-dependent and age-dependent rate). A particular case is the classical birth--death process. Stop this process at time T>0T>0. It is known that the tree spanned by the NN tips alive at time TT of the tree thus obtained (called reduced tree or coalescent tree) is a coalescent point process (CPP), which basically means that the depths of interior nodes are iid. Now select each of the NN tips independently with probability yy (Bernoulli sample). It is known that the tree generated by the selected tips, which we will call Bernoulli sampled CPP, is again a CPP. Now instead, select exactly kk tips uniformly at random among the NN tips (kk-sample). We show that the tree generated by the selected tips is a mixture of Bernoulli sampled CPPs with the same parent CPP, over some explicit distribution of the sampling probability yy. An immediate consequence is that the genealogy of a kk-sample can be obtained by the realization of kk random variables, first the random sampling probability YY and then the k1k-1 node depths which are iid conditional on Y=yY=y.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1710.02220,
  title  = {The genealogy of a sample from a binary branching process},
  author = {Amaury Lambert},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.02220},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

19 pages, 1 figure, submitted to a special issue of Theoretical Population Biology in memory of Paul Joyce

R2 v1 2026-06-22T22:05:12.487Z