English

A universal right tail upper bound for supercritical Galton-Watson processes with bounded offspring

Probability 2024-01-12 v2

Abstract

We consider a supercritical Galton-Watson process ZnZ_n whose offspring distribution has mean m>1m>1 and is bounded by some d{2,3,}d\in \{2,3,\ldots\}. As well-known, the associated martingale Wn=Zn/mnW_n=Z_n/m^n converges a.s. to some nonnegative random variable WW_\infty. We provide a universal upper bound for the right tail of WW_\infty and WnW_n, which is uniform in nn and in all offspring distributions with given mm and dd, namely: P(Wnx)c1exp{c2m1mxd},nN{+},x0, P(W_n\ge x)\le c_1 \exp\left\{-c_2 \frac {m-1}m \frac x d\right\}, \quad \forall n\in \mathbb N \cup \{+\infty\}, \forall x\ge 0, for some explicit constants c1,c2>0c_1,c_2>0. For a given offspring distribution, our upper bound decays exponentially as xx\to \infty, which is actually suboptimal, but our bound is universal\textit{universal}: it provides a single effective\textit{effective} expression, which is nonasymptotic\textit{nonasymptotic} - it does not require xx large - and valid simultaneously for all supercritical bounded offspring distributions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2307.07241,
  title  = {A universal right tail upper bound for supercritical Galton-Watson processes with bounded offspring},
  author = {John Fernley and Emmanuel Jacob},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.07241},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

7 pages, 1 figure

R2 v1 2026-06-28T11:30:18.668Z