English

The tree length of an evolving coalescent

Probability 2010-05-18 v3

Abstract

A well-established model for the genealogy of a large population in equilibrium is Kingman's coalescent. For the population together with its genealogy evolving in time, this gives rise to a time-stationary tree-valued process. We study the sum of the branch lengths, briefly denoted as tree length, and prove that the (suitably compensated) sequence of tree length processes converges, as the population size tends to infinity, to a limit process with cadlag paths, infinite infinitesimal variance, and a Gumbel distribution as its equilibrium.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0908.2444,
  title  = {The tree length of an evolving coalescent},
  author = {Peter Pfaffelhuber and Anton Wakolbinger and Heinz Weisshaupt},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0908.2444},
  year   = {2010}
}

Comments

23 pages, 6 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-21T13:36:15.161Z