Large deviation principles and related results are given for a class of Markov chains associated to the "leaves" in random recursive trees and preferential attachment random graphs, as well as the "cherries" in Yule trees.
In particular, the method of proof, combining analytic and Dupuis-Ellis type path arguments, allows for an explicit computation of the large deviation pressure.
We are interested in the asymptotic behavior of critical Galton-Watson trees whose offspring distribution may have infinite variance, which are conditioned on having a large fixed number of leaves. We first find an asymptotic estimate for the probability of a Galton-Watson tree having $n$ leaves. Secondly, we let $t_n$ be a critical Galton-Watson tree whose offspring distribution is in the domain of attraction of a stable law, and conditioned on having exactly $n$ leaves. We show that the rescaled Lukasiewicz path and contour function of $t_n$ converge respectively to $X^{exc}$ and $H^{exc}$, …
Consider biased random walks on two Galton-Watson trees without leaves having progeny distributions $P_1$ and $P_2$ (GW$(P_1)$ and GW$(P_2)$) where $P_1$ and $P_2$ are supported on positive integers and $P_1$ dominates $P_2$ stochastically. We prove that the speed of the walk on GW$(P_1)$ is bigger than the same on GW$(P_2)$ when the bias is larger than a threshold depending on $P_1$ and $P_2$. This partially answers a question raised by Ben Arous, Fribergh and Sidoravicius.
We consider a biased random walk $X_n$ on a Galton-Watson tree with leaves in the sub-ballistic regime. We prove that there exists an explicit constant $γ= γ(β) \in (0,1)$, depending on the bias $β$, such that $X_n$ is of order $n^γ$. Denoting $Δ_n$ the hitting time of level $n$, we prove that $Δ_n/n^{1/γ}$ is tight. Moreover we show that $Δ_n/n^{1/γ}$ does not converge in law (at least for large values of $β$). We prove that along the sequences $n_λ(k)=\lfloor λβ^{γk}\rfloor$, $Δ_n/n^{1/γ}$ converges to certain infinitely divisible laws. Key tools for the proof are the classical Harris decomp…
We study protected nodes in $m$-ary search trees, by putting them in context of generalised Pólya urns. We show that the number of two-protected nodes (the nodes that are neither leaves nor parents of leaves) in a random ternary search tree is asymptotically normal. The methods apply in principle to $m $-ary search trees with larger $m$ as well, although the size of the matrices used in the calculations grow rapidly with $ m $; we conjecture that the method yields an asymptotically normal distribution for all $m\leq 26$. The one-protected nodes, and their complement, i.e., the leaves, are easi…
Given an edge-weighted tree $T$ with $n$ leaves, sample the leaves uniformly at random without replacement and let $W_k$, $2 \le k \le n$, be the length of the subtree spanned by the first $k$ leaves. We consider the question, "Can $T$ be identified (up to isomorphism) by the joint probability distribution of the random vector $(W_2, \ldots, W_n)$?" We show that if $T$ is known {\em a priori} to belong to one of various families of edge-weighted trees, then the answer is, "Yes." These families include the edge-weighted trees with edge-weights in general position, the ultrametric edge-weighted …
In this note, we prove a quenched functional central limit theorem for a biased random walk on a supercritical Galton-Watson tree with leaves. This extends a result of Peres and Zeitouni (2008) where the case without leaves is considered. A conjecture of Ben Arous and Fribergh (2016) suggests an upper bound on the bias which we observe to be sharp.
In this paper, we consider the linearly reinforced and the once-reinforced random walk models in the transient phase on trees. We show the large deviations for the upper tails for both models. We also show the exponential decay for the lower tail in the once-reinforced random walk model. On the other hand, the lower tail is in polynomial decay for the linearly reinforced random walk model.
The Horton-Strahler analysis is a graph-theoretic method to measure the bifurcation complexity of branching patterns, by defining a number called the order to each branch. The main result of this paper is a large deviation theorem for the number of branches of each order in a random binary tree. The rate function associated with a large deviation cannot be derived in a closed form; instead, asymptotic forms of the rate function are given.
Consider a random walk in random environment on a supercritical Galton--Watson tree, and let $τ_n$ be the hitting time of generation $n$. The paper presents a large deviation principle for $τ_n/n$, both in quenched and annealed cases. Then we investigate the subexponential situation, revealing a polynomial regime similar to the one encountered in one dimension. The paper heavily relies on estimates on the tail distribution of the first regeneration time.
We provide deviation inequalities for properly normalized sums of bifurcating Markov chains on Galton-Watson tree. These processes are extension of bifurcating Markov chains (which was introduced by Guyon to detect cellular aging from cell lineage) in case the index set is a binary Galton-Watson process. As application, we derive deviation inequalities for the least-squares estimator of autoregressive parameters of bifurcating autoregressive processes with missing data. These processes allow, in case of cell division, to take into account the cell's death. The results are obtained under an uni…
Ben Arous, Fribergh and Sidoravicius \cite{GAV2014} proved that speed of biased random walk $RW_λ$ on a Galton-Watson tree without leaves is strictly decreasing for $λ\leq \frac{m_1}{1160},$ where $m_1$ is minimal degree of the Galton-Watson tree. And A\"ıdékon \cite{EA2013} improved this result to $λ\leq \frac{1}{2}.$ In this paper, we prove that for the $RW_λ$ on a Galton-Watson tree without leaves, its speed is strictly decreasing for $λ\in \left[0,\frac{m_1}{1+\sqrt{1-\frac{1}{m_1}}}\right]$ when $m_1\geq 2;$ and we owe the proof to A\"ıdékon \cite{EA2013}.
Noise sensitivity of functions on the leaves of a binary tree is studied, and a hypercontractive inequality is obtained. We deduce that the spider walk is not noise stable.
We study the asymptotic behavior af the number of cuts $X(T_n)$ needed to isolate the root in a rooted binary random tree $T_n$ with $n$ leaves. We focus on the case of subtrees of the Continuum Random Tree generated by uniform sampling of leaves. We elaborate on a recent result by Abraham and Delmas, who showed that $X(T_n)/\sqrt{2n}$ converges a.s. towards a Rayleigh-distributed random variable $Θ$, which gives a continuous analog to an earlier result by Janson on conditioned, finite-variance Galton-Watson trees. We prove a convergence in distribution of $n^{-1/4}(X(T_n)-\sqrt{2n}Θ)$ towards…
We consider large random trees under Gibbs distributions and prove a Large Deviation Principle (LDP) for the distribution of degrees of vertices of the tree. The LDP rate function is given explicitly. An immediate consequence is a Law of Large Numbers for the distribution of vertex degrees in a large random tree. Our motivation for this study comes from the analysis of RNA secondary structures.
Consider the Aldous Markov chain on the space of rooted binary trees with $n$ labeled leaves in which at each transition a uniform random leaf is deleted and reattached to a uniform random edge. Now, fix $1\le k < n$ and project the leaf mass onto the subtree spanned by the first $k$ leaves. This yields a binary tree with edge weights that we call a "decorated $k$-tree with total mass $n$." We introduce label swapping dynamics for the Aldous chain so that, when it runs in stationarity, the decorated $k$-trees evolve as Markov chains themselves, and are projectively consistent over $k\le n$. Th…
A radix sort tree arises when storing distinct infinite binary words in the leaves of a binary tree such that for any two words their common prefixes coincide with the common prefixes of the corresponding two leaves. If one deletes the out-degree $1$ vertices in the radix sort tree and "closes up the gaps", then the resulting PATRICIA tree maintains all the information that is necessary for sorting the infinite words into lexicographic order. We investigate the PATRICIA chains -- the tree-valued Markov chains that arise when successively building the PATRICIA trees for the collection of infini…
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 $T_n$, from the tree-top to the level when there are $n$ lines in the tree satisfies $nT_n \xrightarrow{n\to\infty} 2$ almost surely; (ii) At time $T_n$, the population is naturally partitioned in exactly $n$ families where individuals belong to the same family if the…
We study the growth of a time-ordered rooted tree by probabilistic attachment of new vertices to leaves. We construct a likelihood function of the leaves based on the connectivity of the tree. We take such connectivity to be induced by the merging of directed ordered paths from leaves to the root. Combining the likelihood with an assigned prior distribution leads to a posterior leaf distribution from which we sample attachment points for new vertices. We present computational examples of such Bayesian tree growth. Although the discussion is generic, the initial motivation for the paper is the …
Consider $k$-colorings of the complete tree of depth $\ell$ and branching factor $Δ$. If we fix the coloring of the leaves, as $\ell$ tends to $\infty$, for what range of $k$ is the root uniformly distributed over all $k$ colors? This corresponds to the threshold for uniqueness of the infinite-volume Gibbs measure. It is straightforward to show the existence of colorings of the leaves which ``freeze'' the entire tree when $k\leΔ+1$. For $k\geqΔ+2$, Jonasson proved the root is ``unbiased'' for any fixed coloring of the leaves and thus the Gibbs measure is unique. What happens for a {\em typical…
In this article, we prove a joint large deviation principle in $n$ for the \emph{empirical pair measure} and \emph{ empirical offspring measure} of critical multitype Galton-Watson trees conditioned to have exactly $n$ vertices in the weak topology. From this result we extend the large deviation principle for the empirical pair measures of Markov chains on simply generated trees to cover offspring laws which are not treated by \cite[Theorem~2.1]{DMS03}. For the case where the offspring law of the tree is a geometric distribution with parameter \sfrac{1}{2}, we get an exact rate function. All o…
We consider the transmission of a state from the root of a tree towards its leaves, assuming that each transmission occurs through a noisy channel. The states at the leaves are observed, while at deeper nodes we can compute the likelihood of each state given the observation. In this sense, information flows from child nodes towards the parent node. Here we find an upper bound of this children-to-parent information flow. To do so, first we introduce a new measure of information, the memory vector, whose norm quantifies whether all states have the same likelihood. Then we find conditions such th…
Given a finite typed rooted tree $T$ with $n$ vertices, the {\em empirical subtree measure} is the uniform measure on the $n$ typed subtrees of $T$ formed by taking all descendants of a single vertex. We prove a large deviation principle in $n$, with explicit rate function, for the empirical subtree measures of multitype Galton-Watson trees conditioned to have exactly $n$ vertices. In the process, we extend the notions of shift-invariance and specific relative entropy--as typically understood for Markov fields on deterministic graphs such as $\mathbb Z^d$--to Markov fields on random trees. We …
We introduce two models for multi-type random trees motivated by studies of trait dependence in the evolution of species. Our discrete time model, the multi-type ERM tree, is a generalization of Markov propagation models on a random tree generated by a binary search or `equal rates Markov' mechanism. Our continuous time model, the multi-type Yule tree with mutations, is a multi-type generalization of the tree generated by a pure birth or Yule process. We study type dependent topological properties of these two random tree models. We derive asymptotic results that allow one to infer model param…
Consider the Erdős-Renyi random graph on n vertices where each edge is present independently with probability c/n, with c>0 fixed. For large n, a typical random graph locally behaves like a Galton-Watson tree with Poisson offspring distribution with mean c. Here, we study large deviations from this typical behavior within the framework of the local weak convergence of finite graph sequences. The associated rate function is expressed in terms of an entropy functional on unimodular measures and takes finite values only at measures supported on trees. We also establish large deviations for other …