The Fleming-Viot (FV) process is a measure-valued diffusion that models the evolution of type frequencies in a countable population which evolves under resampling (genetic drift), mutation, and selection. In the classic FV model the fitness (strength) of types is given by a measurable function. In this paper, we introduce and study the Fleming-Viot process in random environment (FVRE), when by random environment we mean the fitness of types is a stochastic process with càdlàg paths. We identify FVRE as the unique solution to a so called quenched martingale problem and derive some of its properties via martingale and duality methods. We develop the duality methods for general time-inhomogeneous and quenched martingale problems. In fact, some important aspects of the duality relations only appears for time-inhomogeneous (and quenched) martingale problems. For example, we see that duals evolve backward in time with respect to the main Markov process whose evolution is forward in time. Using a family of function-valued dual processes for FVRE, we prove that, as the number of individuals $N$ tends to $\infty$, the measure-valued Moran process $μ_N^{e_N}$ (with fitness process $e_N$) converges weakly in Skorokhod topology of càdlàg functions to the FVRE process $μ^e$ (with fitness process $e$), if $e_N \rightarrow e$ a.s. in Skorokhod topology of càdlàg functions. We also study the long-time behaviour of FVRE process $(μ_t^e)_{t\geq 0}$ joint with its fitness process $e=(e_t)_{t\geq 0}$ and prove that the joint FV-environment process $(μ_t^e,e_t)_{t\geq 0}$ is ergodic under the assumption of weak ergodicity of $e$.
For a probability-measure-valued neutral Fleming-Viot process $Z_t$ with Lévy mutation and resampling mechanism associated to a general $Λ$-coalescent with multiple collisions, we prove the instantaneous propagation of supports. That is, at any fixed time $t>0$, with probability one the closed support $S(Z_t)$ of the Fleming-Viot process satisfies $S(ν* Z_t) \subseteq S(Z_t)$, where $ν$ is the Lévy measure of the mutation process. To show this result, we apply Donnelly-Kurtz's lookdown particle representation for Fleming-Viot process.
We prove under mild conditions that the Fleming-Viot process selects the minimal quasi-stationary distribution for Markov processes with soft killing on non-compact state spaces. Our results are applied to multi-dimensional birth and death processes, continuous time Galton-Watson processes and diffusion processes with soft killing.
The purpose of this paper is to extend the investigation of the Fleming-Viot process in discrete space started in a previous work to two specific examples. The first one corresponds to a random walk on the complete graph. Due to its geometry, we establish several explicit and optimal formulas for the Fleming-Viot process (invariant distribution, correlations, spectral gap). The second example corresponds to a Markov chain in a two state space. In this case, the study of the Fleming-Viot particle system is reduced to the study of birth and death process with quadratic rates.
Reversible measures of the Fleming-Viot process are shown to be characterized as quasi-invariant measures with a cocycle given in terms of the mutation operator. As applications, we give certain integral characterization of Poisson-Dirichlet distributions and a proof that the stationary measure of the step-wise mutation model of Ohta-Kimura with periodic boundary condition is nonreversible.
The (Ξ, A)-Fleming-Viot process with mutation is a probability-measure-valued process whose moment dual is similar to that of the classical Fleming-Viot process except that the Kingman's coalescent is replaced by the Ξ-coalescent, the coalescent with simultaneous multiple collisions. We first prove the existence of such a process for general mutation generator A. We then investigate its reversibility. We also study both the weak and strong uniqueness of solution to the associated stochastic partial differential equation.
Using the lookdown construction of Donnelly and Kurtz we prove that, at any fixed positive time, the $Λ$-Fleming-Viot process with underlying Brownian motion has a compact support provided that the corresponding $Λ$-coalescent comes down from infinity not too slowly. We also find both upper bound and lower bound on the Hausdorff dimension for the support.
Branching processes and Fleming-Viot processes are two main models in stochastic population theory. Incorporating an immigration in both models, we generalize the results of Shiga (1990) and Birkner et al. (2005) which respectively connect the Feller diffusion with the classical Fleming-Viot process and the alpha-stable continuous state branching process with the Beta(2-alpha, alpha)-generalized Fleming-Viot process. In a recent work, a new class of probability-measure valued processes, called M-generalized Fleming-Viot processes with immigration, has been set up in duality with the so-called …
Let $Λ$ be a finite measure on the unit interval. A $Λ$-Fleming-Viot process is a probability measure valued Markov process which is dual to a coalescent with multiple collisions ($Λ$-coalescent) in analogy to the duality known for the classical Fleming Viot process and Kingman's coalescent, where $Λ$ is the Dirac measure in 0. We explicitly construct a dual process of the coalescent with simultaneous multiple collisions ($Ξ$-coalescent) with mutation, the $Ξ$-Fleming-Viot process with mutation, and provide a representation based on the empirical measure of an exchangeable particle system alon…
Consider N particles moving independently, each one according to a subcritical continuous-time Galton-Watson process unless it hits 0, at which time it jumps instantaneously to the position of one of the other particles chosen uniformly at random. The resulting dynamics is called Fleming-Viot process. We show that for each N there exists a unique invariant measure for the Fleming-Viot process, and that its stationary empirical distribution converges, as N goes to infinity, to the minimal quasi-stationary distribution of the Galton-Watson process conditioned on non-extinction.
We consider the empirical measures of multi-type voter models with mutation on large finite sets, and prove their weak atomic convergence in the sense of Ethier and Kurtz (1994) toward a Fleming-Viot process. Convergence in the weak atomic topology is strong enough to answer a line of inquiry raised by Aldous (2013) concerning the distributions of the corresponding entropy processes and diversity processes for types.
Estimates for exit time from an interval of length 2r before a prescribed time T are derived for solutions of a class of stochastic partial differential equations used to characterize two population models: super-Brownian motion and Fleming-Viot Process. These types of estimates are then derived for the two population models. The corresponding large deviation results are also applied for the acquired bounds.
We show uniqueness of the spine of a Fleming-Viot particle system under minimal assumptions on the driving process. If the driving process is a continuous time Markov process on a finite space, we show that asymptotically, when the number of particles goes to infinity, the branching rate for the spine is twice that of a generic particle in the system, and every side branch has the distribution of the unconditioned generic branching tree.
This paper provides a construction of a Fleming--Viot measure valued diffusion process, for which the transition function is known, by extending recent ideas of the Gibbs sampler based Markov processes. In particular, we concentrate on the Chapman--Kolmogorov consistency conditions which allows a simple derivation of such a Fleming--Viot process, once a key and apparently new combinatorial result for Pólya-urn sequences has been established.
We show that a space-time rescaling of the spatial Lamba-Fleming-Viot process of Barton and Etheridge converges to super-Brownian motion. This can be viewed as an extension of a result of Chetwynd-Diggle and Etheridge (2018). In that work the scaled impact factors (which govern the event based dynamics) vanish in the limit, here we drop that requirement. The analysis is particularly interesting in the biologically relevant two-dimensional case.
The star-shaped $Λ$-coalescent and corresponding $Λ$-Fleming-Viot process where the $Λ$ measure has a single atom at unity are studied in this paper. The transition functions and stationary distribution of the $Λ$-Fleming-Viot process are derived in a two-type model with mutation. The distribution of the number of non-mutant lines back in time in the star-shaped $Λ$-coalescent is found. Extensions are made to a model with $d$ types, either with parent independent mutation or general Markov mutation, and an infinitely-many-types model when $d\to \infty$. An eigenfunction expansion for the trans…
If $\mathbf Y$ is a standard Fleming-Viot process with constant mutation rate (in the infinitely many sites model) then it is well known that for each $t>0$ the measure $\mathbf Y_t$ is purely atomic with infinitely many atoms. However, Schmuland proved that there is a critical value for the mutation rate under which almost surely there are exceptional times at which $\mathbf Y$ is a finite sum of weighted Dirac masses. In the present work we discuss the existence of such exceptional times for the generalized Fleming-Viot processes. In the case of Beta-Fleming-Viot processes with index $α\in\,…
We discuss a Markov jump process regarded as a variant of the CIR (Cox-Ingersoll-Ross) model and its infinite-dimensional extension. These models belong to a class of measure-valued branching processes with immigration, whose jump mechanisms are governed by certain stable laws. The main result gives a lower spectral gap estimate for the generator. As an application, a certain ergodic property is shown for the generalized Fleming-Viot process obtained as the time-changed ratio process.
The distribution of a Markov process with killing, conditioned to be still alive at a given time, can be approximated by a Fleming-Viot type particle system. In such a system, each particle is simulated independently according to the law of the underlying Markov process, and branches onto another particle at each killing time. The consistency of this method in the large population limit was the subject of several recent articles. In the present paper, we go one step forward and prove a central limit theorem for the law of the Fleming-Viot particle system at a given time under two conditions: a…
We study the large scale behaviour of a population consisting of two types which evolve in dimension d = 1, 2 according to a spatial Lambda- Fleming-Viot process subject to random time-independent selection. If one of the two types is rare compared to the other, we prove that its evolution can be approximated by a super-Brownian motion in a random (and singular) environment. Without the sparsity assumption, a diffusion approximation leads to a Fisher-KPP equation in a random potential. The proofs build on two-scale Schauder estimates and semidiscrete approximations of the Anderson Hamiltonian.
We consider N nearest neighbor random walks on the positive integers with a drift towards the origin. When one walk reaches the origin, it jumps to the position of one of the other N-1 walks, chosen uniformly at random. We show that this particle system is ergodic, and establish some exponential moments of the rightmost position, under the stationary measure.
The goal of this paper is to unify the lookdown representation and the stochastic flow of bridges, which are two approaches to construct the $Λ$-Fleming-Viot process along with its genealogy. First we introduce the stochastic flow of partitions and show that it provides a new formulation of the lookdown representation. Second we study the asymptotic behaviour of the $Λ$-Fleming-Viot process and we provide sufficient conditions for the existence of an infinite sequence of Eves that generalise the primitive Eve of Bertoin and Le Gall. Finally under the condition that this infinite sequence of Ev…
We are concerned with Mosco type convergence for a non-symmetric $n$-particle Fleming-Viot system $\{X_1,\ldots,X_n\}$ in a bounded $d$-dimensional domain $D$ with smooth boundary. Moreover, we are interested in relative compactness of the $n$-particle processes. It turns out that integration by parts relative to the initial measure and the generator is the appropriate mathematical tool. For finitely many particles, such integration by parts is established by using probabilistic arguments. For the limiting infinite dimensional configuration we use a result from infinite dimensional non-gaussia…
For a class of $Λ$-Fleming-Viot processes with Brownian spatial motion in $\mathbb{R}^d$ whose associated $Λ$-coalescents come down from infinity, we obtain sharp global and local modulus of continuities for the ancestry processes recovered from the lookdown representations. As applications, we prove both global and local modulus of continuities for the $Λ$-Fleming-Viot support processes. In particular, if the $Λ$-coalescent is the Beta$(2-β,β)$ coalescent for $β\in(1,2]$ with $β=2$ corresponding to Kingman's coalescent, then for $h(t)=\sqrt{t\log (1/t)}$, the global modulus of continuity hold…
For a class of $Λ$-Fleming-Viot processes with underlying Brownian motion whose associated $Λ$-coalescents come down from infinity, we prove a one-sided modulus of continuity result for their ancestry processes recovered from the lookdown construction of Donnelly and Kurtz. As applications, we first show that such a $Λ$-Fleming-Viot support process has one-sided modulus of continuity (with modulus function $C\sqrt{t\log(1/t)}$) at any fixed time. We also show that the support is compact simultaneously at all positive times, and given the initial compactness, its range is uniformly compact over…
We identify stationary distributions of generalized Fleming-Viot processes with jump mechanisms specified by certain beta laws together with a parameter measure. Each of these distributions is obtained from normalized stable random measures after a suitable biased transformation followed by mixing by the law of a Dirichlet random measure with the same parameter measure. The calculations are based primarily on the well-known relationship to measure-valued branching processes with immigration.
A class of Fleming-Viot processes with decaying sampling rates and $α$-stable motions that correspond to distributions with growing populations are introduced and analyzed. Almost sure long-time scaling limits for these processes are developed, addressing the question of long-time population distribution for growing populations. Asymptotics in higher orders are investigated. Convergence of particle location occupation and inhabitation time processes are also addressed and related by way of the historical process. The basic results and techniques allow general Feller motion/mutation and may app…
We obtain the Brownian net of Sun and Swart (2008) as the scaling limit of the paths traced out by a system of continuous (one-dimensional) space and time branching and coalescing random walks. This demonstrates a certain universality of the net, which we have not seen explored elsewhere. The walks themselves arise in a natural way as the ancestral lineages relating individuals in a sample from a biological population evolving according to the spatial Lambda-Fleming-Viot process. Our scaling reveals the effect, in dimension one, of spatial structure on the spread of a selectively advantageous …
We study the Fleming-Viot particle process formed by N interacting continuous-time asymmetric random walks on the cycle graph, with uniform killing. We show that this model has a remarkable exact solvability, despite the fact that it is non-reversible with non-explicit invariant distribution. Our main results include quantitative propagation of chaos and exponential ergodicity with explicit constants, as well as formulas for covariances at equilibrium in terms of the Chebyshev polynomials. We also obtain a bound uniform in time for the convergence of the proportion of particles in each state w…
We consider the tree-valued Fleming-Viot process, $(\mathcal X_t)_{t\geq 0}$, with mutation and selection as studied in Depperschmidt, Greven, Pfaffelhuber (2012). This process models the stochastic evolution of the genealogies and (allelic) types under resampling, mutation and selection in the population currently alive in the limit of infinitely large populations. Genealogies and types are described by (isometry classes of) marked metric measure spaces. The long-time limit of the neutral tree-valued Fleming-Viot dynamics is an equilibrium given via the marked metric measure space associated …
We consider a Fleming-Viot-type particle system consisting of independently moving particles that are killed on the boundary of a domain. At the time of death of a particle, another particle branches. If there are only two particles and the underlying motion is a Bessel process on $(0,\infty)$, both particles converge to 0 at a finite time if and only if the dimension of the Bessel process is less than 0. If the underlying diffusion is Brownian motion with a drift stronger than (but arbitrarily close to, in a suitable sense) the drift of a Bessel process, all particles converge to 0 at a finit…
This article presents a variant of Fleming-Viot particle systems, which are a standard way to approximate the law of a Markov process with killing as well as related quantities. Classical Fleming-Viot particle systems proceed by simulating $N$ trajectories, or particles, according to the dynamics of the underlying process, until one of them is killed. At this killing time, the particle is instantaneously branched on one of the $(N-1)$ other ones, and so on until a fixed and finite final time $T$. In our variant, we propose to wait until $K$ particles are killed and then rebranch them independe…
In previous work, we constructed Fleming--Viot-type measure-valued diffusions (and diffusions on a space of interval partitions of the unit interval $[0,1]$) that are stationary with the Poisson--Dirichlet laws with parameters $α\in(0,1)$ and $θ\geq 0$. In this paper, we complete the proof that these processes resolve a conjecture by Feng and Sun (2010) by showing that the processes of ranked atom sizes (or of ranked interval lengths) of these diffusions are members of a two-parameter family of diffusions introduced by Petrov (2009), extending a model by Ethier and Kurtz (1981) in the case $α=…
We consider the Fleming--Viot particle system associated with a continuous-time Markov chain in a finite space. Assuming irreducibility, it is known that the particle system possesses a unique stationary distribution, under which its empirical measure converges to the quasistationary distribution of the Markov chain. We complement this Law of Large Numbers with a Central Limit Theorem. Our proof essentially relies on elementary computations on the infinitesimal generator of the Fleming--Viot particle system, and involves the so-called $π$-return process in the expression of the asymptotic vari…
We show, for a class of discrete Fleming-Viot (or Moran) type particle systems, that the convergence to the equilibrium is exponential for a suitable Wassertein coupling distance. The approach provides an explicit quantitative estimate on the rate of convergence. As a consequence, we show that the conditioned process converges exponentially fast to a unique quasi-stationary distribution. Moreover, by estimating the two-particle correlations, we prove that the Fleming-Viot process converges, uniformly in time, to the conditioned process with an explicit rate of convergence. We illustrate our re…
It is well known that the dynamics of a subpopulation of individuals of a rare type in a Wright-Fisher diffusion can be approximated by a Feller branching process. Here we establish an analogue of that result for a spatially distributed population whose dynamics are described by a spatial Lambda-Fleming-Viot process (SLFV). The subpopulation of rare individuals is then approximated by a superBrownian motion. This result mirrors Cox et al. (2000), where it is shown that when suitably rescaled, sparse voter models converge to superBrownian motion. We also prove the somewhat more surprising resul…
Consider a continuous time Markov chain with rates Q in the state space Λ\cup\{0\} with 0 as an absorbing state. In the associated Fleming-Viot process N particles evolve independently in Λwith rates Q until one of them attempts to jump to the absorbing state 0. At this moment the particle comes back to Λinstantaneously, by jumping to one of the positions of the other particles, chosen uniformly at random. When Λis finite, we show that the empirical distribution of the particles at a fixed time converges as N\to\infty to the distribution of a single particle at the same time conditioned on non…
We consider a branching particle model in which particles move inside a Euclidean domain according to the following rules. The particles move as independent Brownian motions until one of them hits the boundary. This particle is killed but another randomly chosen particle branches into two particles, to keep the population size constant. We prove that the particle population does not approach the boundary simultaneously in a finite time in some Lipschitz domains. This is used to prove a limit theorem for the empirical distribution of the particle family.
Fleming-Viot type particle systems represent a classical way to approximate the distribution of a Markov process with killing, given that it is still alive at a final deterministic time. In this context, each particle evolves independently according to the law of the underlying Markov process until its killing, and then branches instantaneously on another randomly chosen particle. While the consistency of this algorithm in the large population limit has been recently studied in several articles, our purpose here is to prove Central Limit Theorems under very general assumptions. For this, we on…
We consider a new type of lookdown processes where spatial motion of each individual is influenced by an individual noise and a common noise, which could be regarded as an environment. Then a class of probability measure-valued processes on real line $\mbb{R}$ are constructed. The sample path properties are investigated: the values of this new type process are either purely atomic measures or absolutely continuous measures according to the existence of individual noise. When the process is absolutely continuous with respect to Lebesgue measure, we derive a new stochastic partial differential e…
We investigate the behaviour of an establishing mutation which is subject to rapidly fluctuating selection under the Lambda-Fleming-Viot model and show that under a suitable scaling it converges to the Feller diffusion in a random environment. We then extend to a population that is distributed across a spatial continuum. In this setting the scaling limit is the SuperBrownian motion in a random environment.The scaling results for the behaviour of the rare allele are achieved via particle representations which belong to the family of `lookdown constructions'. This generalises the results obtaine…
The spatial Lambda-Fleming-Viot (SLFV) process (Barton, Etheridge and Véber, 2010) can be seen as a generalised Voter Model with configuration space $M^{R^d}$, where M is the set of probability measures on some space K. Such processes are usually studied thanks to a dual process that describes the genealogy of a sample of particles. In this paper, we study the growth of a cluster, and our surprising result is that with probability one, every bounded cluster stops growing in finite time. Because the traditional (backward in time) duality methods fail, we develop an original forward in time appr…
We study the evolution of genealogies of a population of individuals, whose type frequencies result in an interacting Fleming-Viot process on $\Z$. We construct and analyze the genealogical structure of the population in this genealogy-valued Fleming-Viot process as a marked metric measure space, with each individual carrying its spatial location as a mark. We then show that its time evolution converges to that of the genealogy of a continuum-sites stepping stone model on $\R$, if space and time are scaled diffusively. We construct the genealogies of the continuum-sites stepping stone model as…
The Fleming-Viot measure-valued diffusion is a Markov process describing the evolution of (allelic) types under mutation, selection and random reproduction. We enrich this process by genealogical relations of individuals so that the random type distribution as well as the genealogical distances in the population evolve stochastically. The state space of this tree-valued enrichment of the Fleming-Viot dynamics with mutation and selection (TFVMS) consists of marked ultrametric measure spaces, equipped with the marked Gromov-weak topology and a suitable notion of polynomials as a separating algeb…
Large deviation principles are established for the Fleming-Viot processes with neutral mutation and selection, and the corresponding equilibrium measures as the sampling rate goes to 0. All results are first proved for the finite allele model, and then generalized, through the projective limit technique, to the infinite allele model. Explicit expressions are obtained for the rate functions.
We give a de Finetti type representation for exchangeable random coalescent trees (formally described as semi-ultrametrics) in terms of sampling iid sequences from marked metric measure spaces. We apply this representation to define versions of tree-valued Fleming-Viot processes from a $Ξ$-lookdown model. As state spaces for these processes, we use, besides the space of isomorphy classes of metric measure spaces, also the space of isomorphy classes of marked metric measure spaces and a space of distance matrix distributions. This allows to include the case with dust in which the genealogical t…
The Fleming-Viot process with parent-independent mutation process is one particular neutral population genetic model. As time goes by, some initial species are replaced by mutated ones gradually. Once the population mutation rate is high, mutated species will elbow out all the initial species very quickly. Small time behaviour in this case seems to be the key to understand this fast transition. The small-time asymptotic results related to time scale $\frac{t}θ$ and $a(θ)t$, where $\lim_{θ\to\infty}θa(θ)=0$, are obtained in \cite{MR1815182},\cite{MR1649005}, \cite{MR1887170} and \cite{MR2184086…
In a random complete and separable metric space that we call the lookdown space, we encode the genealogical distances between all individuals ever alive in a lookdown model with simultaneous multiple reproduction events. We construct families of probability measures on the lookdown space and on an extension of it that allows to include the case with dust. From this construction, we read off the tree-valued $Ξ$-Fleming-Viot processes and deduce path properties. For instance, these processes usually have a.s. càdlàg paths with jumps at the times of large reproduction events. In the case of comin…
Reversibility of the Fleming-Viot process with mutation, selection, and recombination is well understood. In this paper, we study the reversibility of a system of Fleming-Viot processes that live on a countable number of colonies interacting with each other through migrations between the colonies. It is shown that reversibility fails when both migration and mutation are non-trivial.
The d-dimensional Lambda-Fleming-Viot generator acting on functions g(x), with x being a vector of d allele frequencies, can be written as a Wright-Fisher generator acting on functions g with a modified random linear argument of x induced by partitioning occurring in the Lambda-Fleming-Viot process. The eigenvalues and right polynomial eigenvectors are easy to see from this representation. The two-dimensional process, which has a one-dimensional generator, is considered in detail. A non-linear equation is found for the Green's function. In a model with genic selection a proof is given that the…
