In this paper we initiate the theory of Crump-Mode-Jagers branching processes (BP) in the setting where no Malthusian parameter exist, i.e., the process grows faster than exponential. A Crump-Mode-Jagers BP is a branching process (in continuous time) where arbitrary dependencies are allowed between the birth-times of the children of a single individual in the population. It is however assumed that these reproduction processes are i.i.d. point processes for different individuals. This paper focuses on determining whether this branching process explodes, that is, the process reaches infinitely many individuals in finite time. We develop comparison techniques between reproduction processes. We study special cases in terms of explosivity such as age-dependent BPs, and epidemic models with contagious intervals. For this, we superimpose a random contagious interval $[I, C]$ on every individual in the BP and keep only the children with birth-times that fall in this interval of the parent. We show that the distribution of the end $C$ of the contagious interval does not matter in terms of explosion, while the distribution of $I$ does: the epidemic explodes if and only if the two age-dependent BPs with the original birth-times and birth-times $I$ explode. We finish studying some pathological examples such as birth-time distributions that are singular to the Lebesque-measure yet they produce an explosive BP with arbitrary power-law offspring distributions.
In this paper, we firstly give a reconstruction for Crump-Mode-Jagers processes with immigration as solutions to a class of stochastic Volterra integral equations, which offers us a new insight for the evolution dynamics of age-dependent population. Based on this new representation, we prove the weak convergence of rescaled Crump-Mode-Jagers processes with immigration to a class of continuous-state branching processes with immigration. Moreover, the limits reveal that the individual law mainly changes the branching mechanism and immigration mechanism proportionally. This covers the results obt…
Consider a supercritical Crump--Mode--Jagers process such that all births are at integer times (the lattice case). We show that under a certain condition on the intensity of the offspring process, the second-order fluctuations of the age distribution are asymptotically normal; the condition is essential and not just a technicality. This extends to populations counted by a random characteristic.
In this paper, we consider random trees associated with the genealogy of Crump-Mode-Jagers processes and perform Bernoulli bond-percolation whose parameter depends on the size of the tree. Our purpose is to show the existence of a giant percolation cluster for appropriate regimes as the size grows. We stress that the family trees of Crump-Mode-Jagers processes include random recursive trees, preferential attachment trees, binary search trees for which this question has been answered by Bertoin, as well as (more general) m-ary search trees, fragmentation trees, median-of-(2l+1) binary search tr…
This paper belongs to a series of papers aiming to investigate scaling limits of Crump-Mode-Jagers (CMJ) trees. In the previous two papers we identified general conditions under which CMJ trees belong to the universality class of Galton-Watson and Bellman-Harris processes. In this paper we identify general conditions for CMJ trees to belong to the universality class of binary, homogeneous CMJ trees. These conditions state that the offspring process should 'look like' a renewal process, and also that it should not accumulate too many atoms near the origin. We show in particular that any renewal…
Crump-Mode-Jagers (CMJ) trees generalize Galton-Watson trees by allowing individuals to live for an arbitrary duration and give birth at arbitrary times during their life-time. In this paper, we exhibit a simple condition under which the height and contour processes of CMJ forests belong to the universality class of Bellman-Harris processes. This condition formalizes an asymptotic independence between the chronological and genealogical structures. We show that it is satisfied by a large class of CMJ processes and in particular, quite surprisingly, by CMJ processes with a finite variance offspr…
Perron-Frobenius theory developed for irreducible non-negative kernels deals with so-called $R$-positive recurrent kernels. If kernel $M$ is $R$-positive recurrent, then the main result determines the limit of the scaled kernel iterations $R^nM^n$ as $n\to\infty$. In the Nummelin's monograph this important result is proven using a regeneration method whose major focus is on $M$ having an atom. In the special case when $M=P$ is a stochastic kernel with an atom, the regeneration method has an elegant explaination in terms of an associated split chain. In this paper we give a new probabilistic in…
Crump-Mode-Jagers (CMJ) trees generalize Galton-Watson trees by allowing individuals to live for an arbitrary duration and give birth at arbitrary times during their life-time. In this paper, we are interested in the height and contour processes encoding a general CMJ tree. We show that the one-dimensional distribution of the height process can be expressed in terms of a random transformation of the ladder height process associated with the underlying Lukasiewicz path. As an application of this result, when edges of the tree are "short" we show that, asymptotically, (1) the height process is o…
We consider a supercritical general branching population where the lifetimes of individuals are i.i.d. with arbitrary distribution and each individual gives birth to new individuals at Poisson times independently from each others. The population counting process of such population is a known as binary homogeneous Crump-Jargers-Mode process. It is known that such processes converges almost surely when correctly renormalized. In this paper, we study the error of this convergence. To this end, we use classical renewal theory and recent works [17, 6, 5] on this model to obtain the moments of the e…
This survey studies asymptotics of random fringe trees and extended fringe trees in random trees that can be constructed as family trees of a Crump-Mode-Jagers branching process, stopped at a suitable time. This includes random recursive trees, preferential attachment trees, fragmentation trees, binary search trees and (more generally) $m$-ary search trees, as well as some other classes of random trees. We begin with general results, mainly due to Aldous (1991) and Jagers and Nerman (1984). The general results are applied to fringe trees and extended fringe trees for several particular types o…
Consider a supercritical Crump--Mode--Jagers process such that all births are at integer times (the lattice case). Let $\widehatμ(z)$ be the generating function of the intensity of the offspring process, and consider the complex roots of $\widehatμ(z)=1$. The smallest (in absolute value) such root is $e^{-α}$, where $α>0$ is the Malthusian parameter; let $γ_*$ be the second smallest absolute value of a root. We show, assuming some technical conditions, that there are three cases: (i) if $γ_*>e^{-α/2}$, then the second-order fluctuations of the age distribution are asymptotically normal; (ii) i…
In this paper, we give sufficient conditions for a Crump-Mode-Jagers process to be bounded in $L_k$ for a given $k>1$. This result is then applied to a recent random graph process motivated by pairwise collaborations and driven by time-dependent branching dynamics. We show that the maximal degree has the same rate of increase as the degree process of a fixed vertex.
We introduce and study the class of branching-stable point measures, which can be seen as an analog of stable random variables when the branching mechanism for point measures replaces the usual addition. In contrast with the classical theory of stable (Lévy) processes, there exists a rich family of branching-stable point measures with \emph{negative} scaling exponent, which can be described as certain Crump-Mode-Jagers branching processes. We investigate the asymptotic behavior of their cumulative distribution functions, that is, the number of atoms in $(-\infty, x]$ as $x\to \infty$, and furt…
Consider a general branching process, a.k.a. Crump-Mode-Jagers process, generated by a perturbed random walk $η_1$, $ξ_1+η_2$, $ξ_1+ξ_2+η_3,\ldots$. Here, $(ξ_1,η_1)$, $(ξ_2, η_2),\ldots$ are independent identically distributed random vectors with arbitrarily dependent positive components. Denote by $N_j(t)$ the number of the $j$th generation individuals with birth times $\leq t$. Assume that $j=j(t)\to\infty$ and $j(t)=o(t^a)$ as $t\to\infty$ for some explicitly given $a>0$ (to be specified in the paper). The corresponding $j$th generation belongs to the set of intermediate generations. We pr…
In his, by now, classical work from 1981, Nerman made extensive use of a crucial martingale $(W_t)_{t \geq 0}$ to prove convergence in probability, in mean and almost surely, of supercritical general branching processes (a.k.a. Crump-Mode-Jagers branching processes) counted with a general characteristic. The martingale terminal value $W$ figures in the limits of his results. We investigate the rate at which the martingale, now called Nerman's martingale, converges to its limit $W$. More precisely, assuming the existence of a Malthusian parameter $α> 0$ and $W_0\in L^2$, we prove a functional c…
We establish two results about local times of spectrally positive stable processes. The first is a general approximation result, uniform in space and on compact time intervals, in a model where each jump of the stable process may be marked by a random path. The second gives moment control on the Hölder constant of the local times, uniformly across a compact spatial interval and in certain random time intervals. For the latter, we introduce the notion of a Lévy process restricted to a compact interval, which is a variation of Lambert's Lévy process confined in a finite interval and of Pistorius…
We consider a branching population where individuals live and reproduce independently. Their lifetimes are i.i.d. and they give birth at a constant rate b. The genealogical tree spanned by this process is called a splitting tree, and the population counting process is a homogeneous, binary Crump-Mode-Jagers process. We suppose that mutations affect individuals independently at a constant rate $\θ$ during their lifetimes, under the infinite-alleles assumption: each new mutation gives a new type, called allele, to his carrier. We study the allele frequency spectrum which is the numbers A(k, t) o…
We consider a spectrally positive Lévy process $X$ that does not drift to $+\infty$, viewed as coding for the genealogical structure of a (sub)critical branching process, in the sense of a contour or exploration process \cite{GaJa98,Lam10}. We denote by $I$ the past infimum process defined for each $t\geq 0$ by $I_t:= \inf_{[0,t]} X$ and we let $γ$ be the unique time at which the excursion of the reflected process $X-I$ away from 0 attains its supremum. We prove that the pre-$γ$ and the post-$γ$ subpaths of this excursion are invariant under space-time reversal, which has several other consequ…
Consider a spectrally positive Stable($1+α$) process whose jumps we interpret as lifetimes of individuals. We mark the jumps by continuous excursions assigning "sizes" varying during the lifetime. As for Crump-Mode-Jagers processes (with "characteristics"), we consider for each level the collection of individuals alive. We arrange their "sizes" at the crossing height from left to right to form an interval partition. We study the continuity and Markov properties of the interval-partition-valued process indexed by level. From the perspective of the Stable($1+α$) process, this yields new theorems…
For a discrete time multitype supercritical Galton-Watson process $(Z_n)_{n\in \mathbb{N}}$ and corresponding genealogical tree $\mathbb{T}$, we associate a new discrete time process $(Z_n^Φ)_{n\in\mathbb{N}}$ such that, for each $n\in \mathbb{N}$, the contribution of each individual $u\in\mathbb{T}$ to $Z_n^Φ$ is determined by a (random) characteristic $Φ$ evaluated at the age of $u$ at time $n$. In other words, $Z_n^Φ$ is obtained by summing over all $u\in \mathbb{T}$ the corresponding contributions $Φ_u$, where $(Φ_u)_{u\in \mathbb{T}}$ are i.i.d. copies of $Φ$. Such processes are known in …
We construct a stationary Markov process corresponding to the evolution of masses and distances of subtrees along the spine from the root to a branch point in a conjectured stationary, continuum random tree-valued diffusion that was proposed by David Aldous. As a corollary this Markov process induces a recurrent extension, with Dirichlet stationary distribution, of a Wright-Fisher diffusion for which zero is an exit boundary of the coordinate processes. This extends previous work of Pal who argued a Wright-Fisher limit for the three-mass process under the conjectured Aldous diffusion until the…
We investigate centrality and root-inference properties in a class of growing random graphs known as sublinear preferential attachment trees. We show that a continuous time branching processes called the Crump-Mode-Jagers (CMJ) branching process is well-suited to analyze such random trees, and prove that almost surely, a unique terminal tree centroid emerges, having the property that it becomes more central than any other fixed vertex in the limit of the random growth process. Our result generalizes and extends previous work establishing persistent centrality in uniform and linear preferential…
Renewal equations are a popular approach used in modelling the number of new infections, i.e., incidence, in an outbreak. We develop a stochastic model of an outbreak based on a time-varying variant of the Crump-Mode-Jagers branching process. This model accommodates a time-varying reproduction number and a time-varying distribution for the generation interval. We then derive renewal-like integral equations for incidence, cumulative incidence and prevalence under this model. We show that the equations for incidence and prevalence are consistent with the so-called back-calculation relationship. …
