We study the evolution of a particle system whose genealogy is given by a supercritical continuous time Galton--Watson tree. The particles move independently according to a Markov process and when a branching event occurs, the offspring locations depend on the position of the mother and the number of offspring. We prove a law of large numbers for the empirical measure of individuals alive at time t. This relies on a probabilistic interpretation of its intensity by mean of an auxiliary process. The latter has the same generator as the Markov process along the branches plus additional jumps, associated with branching events of accelerated rate and biased distribution. This comes from the fact that choosing an individual uniformly at time t favors lineages with more branching events and larger offspring number. The central limit theorem is considered on a special case. Several examples are developed, including applications to splitting diffusions, cellular aging, branching Lévy processes.
We observe the Galton-Watson Branching Processes. Limit properties of transition functions and their convergence to invariant measures are investigated.
We show that the trace of the null recurrent biased random walk on a Galton-Watson tree properly renormalized converges to the Brownian forest. Our result extends to the setting of the random walk in random environment on a Galton-Watson tree.
We show the existance of the stationary distributions of subcritical multitype Galton-Watson processes without any conditions on the mean matrix of the offspring distributions. Some additional properties of the stationary distribution are also proven.
We introduce a certain class of 2-type Galton-Watson trees with edge lengths. We prove that, after an adequate rescaling, the weighted height function of a forest of such trees converges in law to the reflected Brownian motion. We then use this to deduce under mild conditions an invariance principle for multitype Galton--Watson trees with a countable number of types, thus extending a result of G. Miermont on multitype Galton--Watson trees with finitely many types.
In this short note we obtain necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of the moments of the stationary distribution of a subcritical multitype Galton-Watson process with immigration.
We give sufficient conditions on the offspring, the initial and the immigration distributions under which a second-order Galton-Watson process with immigration is regularly varying.
A second-order Galton-Watson process with immigration can be represented as a coordinate process of a 2-type Galton-Watson process with immigration. Sufficient conditions are derived on the offspring and immigration distributions of a second-order Galton-Watson process with immigration under which the corresponding 2-type Galton-Watson process with immigration has a unique stationary distribution such that its common marginals are regularly varying. In the course of the proof sufficient conditions are given under which the distribution of a second-order Galton-Watson process (without immigrati…
In this note we propose a two-spine decomposition of the critical Galton-Watson tree and use this decomposition to give a probabilistic proof of Yaglom's theorem.
We give sufficient conditions on the initial, offspring and immigration distributions under which the distribution of a not necessarily stationary Galton--Watson process with immigration is regularly varying at any fixed time.
We analyze the metastable states near criticality of the bootstrap percolation on Galton-Watson trees. We find that, depending on the exact choice of the offspring distribution, it is possible to have several distinct metastable states, with varying scaling of their duration while approaching criticality.
The Galton-Watson process belongs to standard teaching in probability. The basic theorem says that survival is only possible when the fecondity exceeds 1. The classical proof is essentially analytic, using generating functions and convexity arguments. We give here a more probabilistic proof, in the spirit of Bezuidenhout and Grimmett.
We prove that the speed of a $λ$-biased random walk on a supercritical Galton-Watson tree is differentiable for $λ$ such that the walk is ballistic and obeys a central limit theorem, and give an expression of the derivative using a certain $2$-dimensional Gaussian random variable. The proof heavily uses the renewal structure of Galton-Watson trees that was introduced by Lyons-Pemantle-Peres.
We prove that the speed of $λ$-biased random walks on a supercritical Galton-Watson tree without leaves is differentiable when $λ\in(0,1)$, and give an expression of the derivative using a certain 2-dimensional Gaussian random variable. The proof heavily uses the renewal structure of Galton-Watson trees that was introduced by Lyons-Pemantle-Peres.
We investigate conditioning Galton-Watson trees on general recursive-type events, such as the event that the tree survives until a specific level. It turns out that the conditioned tree is again a type of Galton-Watson tree, with different types of offspring and a level-dependent offspring distribution, which will all be given explicitly. As an interesting application of these results, we will calculate the expected cost of searching a tree until reaching a given level.
We consider infinite Galton-Watson trees without leaves together with i.i.d.~random variables called marks on each of their vertices. We define a class of flow rules on marked Galton-Watson trees for which we are able, under some algebraic assumptions, to build explicit invariant measures. We apply this result, together with the ergodic theory on Galton-Watson trees developed in \cite{LPP95}, to the computation of Hausdorff dimensions of harmonic measures in two cases. The first one is the harmonic measure of the (transient) $λ$-biased random walk on Galton-Watson trees, for which the invarian…
Under minimal condition, we prove the local convergence of a critical multi-type Galton-Watson tree conditioned on having a large total progeny by types towards a multi-type Kesten's tree. We obtain the result by generalizing Neveu's strong ratio limit theorem for aperiodic random walks on Z^d .
We propose a new way to condition random trees, that is, condition random trees to have large maximal out-degree. Under this new conditioning, we show that conditioned critical Galton-Watson trees converge locally to size-biased trees with a unique infinite spine. For the sub-critical case, we obtain local convergence to size-biased trees with a unique infinite node. We also study tail of the maximal out-degree of sub-critical Galton-Watson trees, which is essential for the proof of the local convergence.
We consider invasion percolation on Galton-Watson trees. On almost every Galton-Watson tree, the invasion cluster almost surely contains only one infinite path. This means that for almost every Galton-Watson tree, invasion percolation induces a probability measure on infinite paths from the root. We show that under certain conditions of the progeny distribution, this measure is absolutely continuous with respect to the limit uniform measure. This confirms that invasion percolation, an efficient self-tuning algorithm, may be used to sample approximately from the limit uniform distribution. Addi…
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}.
We prove weak convergence on the Skorokhod space of Galton-Watson processes with immigration, properly normalized, under the assumption that the tail of the immigration distribution has a logarithmic decay. The limits are extremal shot noise processes. By considering marginal distributions, we recover the results of Pakes [Adv. Appl. Probab., 11(1979), 31--62].
We consider a marking procedure of the vertices of a tree where each vertex is marked independently from the others with a probability that depends only on its out-degree. We prove that a critical Galton-Watson tree conditioned on having a large number of marked vertices converges in distribution to the associated size-biased tree. We then apply this result to give the limit in distribution of a critical Galton-Watson tree conditioned on having a large number of protected nodes.
We consider a recurrent random walk on a rooted tree in random environment given by a branching random walk. Up to the first return to the root, its edge local times form a Multi-type Galton-Watson tree with countably infinitely many types. When the walk is the diffusive or sub-diffusive, by studying the maximal type of this Galton-Watson tree, we establish the asymptotic behaviour of the largest local times of this walk during n excursions, under the annealed law.
We consider multi-type Galton Watson trees, and find the distribution of these trees when conditioning on very general types of recursive events. It turns out that the conditioned tree is again a multi-type Galton Watson tree, possibly with more types and with offspring distributions, depending on the type of the father node and on the height of the father node. These distributions are given explicitly. We give some interesting examples for the kind of conditioning we can handle, showing that our methods have a wide range of applications.
Invariant Galton-Watson (IGW) tree measures is a one-parameter family of critical Galton-Watson measures invariant with respect to a large class of tree reduction operations. Such operations include the generalized dynamical pruning (also known as hereditary reduction in a real tree setting) that eliminates descendant subtrees according to the value of an arbitrary subtree function that is monotone nondecreasing with respect to an isometry-induced partial tree order. We show that, under a mild regularity condition, the IGW measures are the only attractors of critical Galton-Watson measures wit…
In this note we consider both the local maximal out-degree and the global maximal out-degree of Galton-Watson trees. In particular, we show that the tail of any local maximal out-degree and that of the offspring distribution are asymptotically of the same order. However for the global maximal out-degree, this is only true in the subcritical case.
In this paper, we study the time required for a λ-biased (λ>1) walk to visit all the vertices of a supercritical Galton-Watson tree up to generation n. Inspired by the extremal landscape approach in [Cortines, Louidor, Saglietti 2018] for the simple random walk on binary trees, we establish the scaling limit of the cover time in the biased setting.
We consider Galton-Watson trees with Geom$(p)$ offspring distribution. We let $T_{\infty}(p)$ denote such a tree conditioned on being infinite. We prove that for any $1/2\leq p_1 <p_2 \leq 1$, there exists a coupling between $T_{\infty}(p_1)$ and $T_{\infty}(p_2)$ such that ${\mathbb P}(T_{\infty}(p_1) \subseteq T_{\infty}(p_2))=1.$
Limit behaviour of temporal and contemporaneous aggregations of independent copies of a stationary multitype Galton-Watson branching process with immigration is studied in the so-called iterated and simultaneous cases, respectively. In both cases, the limit process is a zero mean Brownian motion with the same covariance function under third order moment conditions on the branching and immigration distributions. We specialize our results for generalized integer-valued autoregressive processes and single-type Galton-Watson processes with immigration as well.
In this paper, we consider a critical Galton-Watson branching process with immigration stopped at zero $\mathbf{W}$. Some precise estimation on the generation function of the $n$-th population are obtained, and the tail probability of the life period of $\mathbf{W}$ is studied. Based on above results, two conditional limit theorems for $\mathbf{W}$ are established.
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.
We apply the penalization technique introduced by Roynette, Vallois, Yor for Brownian motion to Galton-Watson processes with a penalizing function of the form $P (x)s^x$ where P is a polynomial of degree p and s $\in$ [0, 1]. We prove that the limiting martingales obtained by this method are most of the time classical ones, except in the super-critical case for s = 1 (or s $\rightarrow$ 1) where we obtain new martingales. If we make a change of probability measure with this martingale, we obtain a multi-type Galton-Watson tree with p distinguished infinite spines.
The linear-fractional Galton-Watson processes is a well known case when many characteristics of a branching process can be computed explicitly. In this paper we extend the two-parameter linear-fractional family to a much richer four-parameter family of reproduction laws. The corresponding Galton-Watson processes also allow for explicit calculations, now with possibility for infinite mean, or even infinite number of offspring. We study the properties of this special family of branching processes, and show, in particular, that in some explosive cases the time to explosion can be approximated by …
Bisexual Galton-Watson processes are discrete Markov chains where reproduction events are due to mating of males and females. Owing to this interaction, the standard branching property of Galton-Watson processes is lost. We prove tightness for conveniently rescaled bisexual Galton-Watson processes, based on recent techniques developed by Bansaye, Caballero and M{é}l{é}ard. We also identify the possible limits of these rescaled processes as solutions of a stochastic system, coupling two equations through singular coefficients in Poisson terms added to square roots as coefficients of Brownian mo…
In this paper we study the vertex cut-trees of Galton-Watson trees conditioned to have $n$ leaves. This notion is a slight variation of Dieuleveut's vertex cut-tree of Galton-Watson trees conditioned to have $n$ vertices. Our main result is a joint Gromov-Hausdorff-Prokhorov convergence in the finite variance case of the Galton-Watson tree and its vertex cut-tree to Bertoin and Miermont's joint distribution of the Brownian CRT and its cut-tree. The methods also apply to the infinite variance case, but the problem to strengthen Dieuleveut's and Bertoin and Miermont's Gromov-Prokhorov convergenc…
We explore the survival function for percolation on Galton-Watson trees. Letting $g(T,p)$ represent the probability a tree $T$ survives Bernoulli percolation with parameter $p$, we establish several results about the behavior of the random function $g(\mathbf{T} , \cdot)$, where $\mathbf{T}$ is drawn from the Galton-Watson distribution. These include almost sure smoothness in the supercritical region; an expression for the $k\text{th}$-order Taylor expansion of $g(\mathbf{T} , \cdot)$ at criticality in terms of limits of martingales defined from $\mathbf{T}$ (this requires a moment condition d…
Take a continuous-time Galton-Watson tree and pick $k$ distinct particles uniformly from those alive at a time $T$. What does their genealogical tree look like? The case $k=2$ has been studied by several authors, and the near-critical asymptotics for general $k$ appear in Harris, Johnston and Roberts (2018). Here we give the full picture.
We give an alternative proof of the fact that the vertex reinforced jump process on Galton- Watson tree has a phase transition between recurrence and transience as a function of c, the initial local time, see [3]. Further, applying the techniques in [1], we show a phase transition between positive speed and null speed for the discrete time process associated in the transient regime.
In this paper we consider random walks on Galton-Watson trees with random conductances. On these trees, the distance of the walker to the root satisfies a law of large numbers with limit the effective velocity, or speed of the walk. We study the regularity of the speed as a function of the distribution of conductances, in particular when the distribution of conductances converges to a non-elliptic limit.
We show that large critical multi-type Galton-Watson trees, when conditioned to be large, converge locally in distribution to an infinite tree which is analoguous to Kesten's infinite monotype Galton-Watson tree. This is proven when we condition on the number of vertices of one fixed types, and with an extra technical assumption if we count at least two types. We then apply these results to study local limits of random planar maps, showing that large critical Boltzmann-distributed random maps converge in distribution to an infinite map.
We prove that the speed of a biased random walk on a supercritical Galton-Watson tree conditioned to survive is analytic within the ballistic regime. This extends the previous work arXiv:1906.07913 in which it was shown that the speed is differentiable within the range of bias for which a central limit theorem holds.
Let $A$ be a primitive matrix and let $λ$ be its Perron-Frobenius eigenvalue. We give formulas expressing the associated normalized Perron-Frobenius eigenvector as a simple functional of a multitype Galton-Watson process whose mean matrix is $A$, as well as of a multitype branching process with mean matrix $e^{(A-I)t}$. These formulas are generalizations of the classical formula for the invariant probability measure of a Markov chain.
We consider a random walk on a Galton-Watson tree in random environment, in the subdiffusive case. We prove the convergence of the renormalised height function of the walk towards the continuous-time height process of a spectrally positive strictly stable Lévy process, jointly with the convergence of the renormalised range of the walk towards the real tree coded by the latter continuous-time height process.
We study biased random walk on subcritical and supercritical Galton-Watson trees conditioned to survive in the transient, sub-ballistic regime. By considering offspring laws with infinite variance, we extend previously known results for the walk on the supercritical tree and observe new trapping phenomena for the walk on the subcritical tree which, in this case, always yield sub-ballisticity. This is contrary to the walk on the supercritical tree which always has some ballistic phase.
