We study a general model of recursive trees where vertices are equipped with independent weights and at each time-step a vertex is sampled with probability proportional to its fitness function (a function of its weight and degree) and connects to $\ell$ new-coming vertices. Under a certain technical assumption, applying the theory of Crump-Mode-Jagers branching processes, we derive formulas for the almost sure limiting distribution of the proportion of vertices with a given degree and weight, and proportion of edges with endpoint having a certain weight. As an application of this theorem, we prove rigorously observations of Bianconi related to the evolving Cayley tree in [$\mathit{Phys. \, Rev. \, E} \; \mathbf{66}, \text{ 036116 (2002)}$]. We also study the process in depth when the technical condition can fail in the particular case when the fitness function is affine, a model we call "generalised preferential attachment with fitness". We show that this model can exhibit condensation where a positive proportion of edges accumulate around vertices with maximal weight, or, more drastically, have a degenerate limiting degree distribution where the entire proportion of edges accumulate around these vertices. Finally, we prove stochastic convergence for the degree distribution under a different assumption of a strong law of large numbers for the partition function associated with the process.
We study two models of growing recursive trees. For both models, initially the tree only contains one vertex $u_1$ and at each time $n\geq 2$ a new vertex $u_n$ is added to the tree and its parent is chosen randomly according to some rule. In the \emph{weighted recursive tree}, we choose the parent $u_k$ of $u_n$ among $\{u_1,u_2,\dots, u_{n-1}\}$ with probability proportional to $w_k$, where $(w_n)_{n\geq1}$ is some deterministic sequence that we fix beforehand. In the \emph{affine preferential attachment tree with fitnesses}, the probability of choosing any $u_k$ is proportional to $a_k+\mat…
Weighted recursive trees are built by adding successively vertices with predetermined weights to a tree: each new vertex is attached to a parent chosen randomly proportionally to its weight. Under some assumptions on the sequence of weights, the first order for the height of such trees has been recently established in [Electron. J. Probab. 26 (2021), Paper No. 80] by one of the authors. In this paper, we obtain the second and third orders in the asymptotic expansion of the height of weighted recursive trees, under similar assumptions. Our methods are inspired from those used to prove similar r…
In this thesis the properties of two kinds of non-uniform random recursive trees are studied. In the first model weights are assigned to each node, thus altering the attachment probabilities. We will call these trees weighted recursive trees. In the second model a different distribution rather than the uniform one is chosen on the symmetric group, namely a riffle shuffle distribution. These trees will be called biased recursive trees. For both of these models the number of branches, the number of leaves, the depth of nodes and some other properties are studied. The focus is on asymptotic resul…
We consider linear preferential attachment trees, and show that they can be regarded as random split trees in the sense of Devroye (1999), although with infinite potential branching. In particular, this applies to the random recursive tree and the standard preferential attachment tree. An application is given to the sum over all pairs of nodes of the common number of ancestors.
We identify the mean growth of the independence number of random binary search trees and random recursive trees and show normal fluctuations around their means. Similarly we also show normal limit laws for the domination number and variations of it for these two cases of random tree models. Our results are an application of a recent general theorem of Holmgren and Janson on fringe trees in these two random tree models.
The purpose of this paper is to analyze certain statistics of a recently introduced non-uniform random tree model, biased recursive trees. This model is based on constructing a random tree by establishing a correspondence with non-uniform permutations, biased riffle shuffles. The statistics that are treated include the number of nodes with a given number of descendants, the depth of the tree, and the number of branches. The model yields the uniform recursive trees as a certain limit, some new results for the uniform case are obtained as well.
We exploit a bijection between plane recursive trees and Stirling permutations; this yields the equivalence of some results previously proven separately by different methods for the two types of objects as well as some new results. We also prove results on the joint distribution of the numbers of ascents, descents and plateaux in a random Stirling permutation. The proof uses an interesting generalized Polya urn
A uniform recursive tree on $n$ vertices is a random tree where each possible $(n-1)!$ labeled recursive rooted tree is selected with equal probability. In this paper we introduce and study weighted trees, a non-uniform recursive tree model departing from the recently introduced Hoppe trees. This class generalizes both uniform recursive trees and Hoppe trees. The generalization provides diversity among the nodes, making the model more flexible for applications. We also analyze the number of leaves, the height, the depth, the number of branches, and the size of the largest branch in these weigh…
We introduce a non-increasing tree growth process $((T_n,σ_n),\, n\ge 1)$, where $T_n$ is a rooted labeled tree on $n$ vertices and $σ_n$ is a permutation of the vertex labels. The construction of $(T_{n},σ_n)$ from $(T_{n-1},σ_{n-1})$ involves rewiring a random (possibly empty) subset of edges in $T_{n-1}$ towards the newly added vertex; as a consequence $T_{n-1} \not\subset T_n$ with positive probability. The key feature of the process is that the shape of $T_n$ has the same law as that of a random recursive tree, while the degree distribution of any given vertex is not monotonous in the pro…
We introduce the problem of isolating several nodes in random recursive trees by successively removing random edges, and study the number of random cuts that are necessary for the isolation. In particular, we analyze the number of random cuts required to isolate $\ell$ selected nodes in a size-n random recursive tree for three different selection rules, namely (i) isolating all of the nodes labelled 1,2,...,$\ell$ (thus nodes located close to the root of the tree), (ii) isolating all of the nodes labelled n+1-$\ell$,n+2-$\ell$,...,n (thus nodes located at the fringe of the tree), and (iii) iso…
We study depth properties of a general class of random recursive trees where each node i attaches to the random node iX_i and X_0, ..., X_n is a sequence of i.i.d. random variables taking values in [0,1). We call such trees scaled attachment random recursive trees (SARRT). We prove that the typical depth D_n, the maximum depth (or height) H_n and the minimum depth M_n of a SARRT are asymptotically given by D_n \sim μ^{-1} \log n, H_n \sim α_{\max} \log n and M_n \sim α_{\min} \log n where μ, α_{\max} and α_{\min} are constants depending only on the distribution of X_0 whenever X_0 has a densit…
A recursive function on a tree is a function in which each leaf has a given value, and each internal node has a value equal to a function of the number of children, the values of the children, and possibly an explicitly specified random element $U$. The value of the root is the key quantity of interest in general. In this first study, all node values and function values are in a finite set $S$. In this note, we describe the limit behavior when the leaf values are drawn independently from a fixed distribution on $S$, and the tree $T_n$ is a random Galton--Watson tree of size $n$.
We prove the monadic second order 0-1 law for two recursive tree models: uniform attachment tree and preferential attachment tree. We also show that the first order 0-1 law does not hold for non-tree uniform attachment models.
We show that an algorithmic construction of sequences of recursive trees leads to a direct proof of the convergence of random recursive trees in an associated Doob-Martin compactification; it also gives a representation of the limit in terms of the input sequence of the algorithm. We further show that this approach can be used to obtain strong limit theorems for various tree functionals, such as path length or the Wiener index.
We consider a multivariate distributional recursion of sum-type as arising in the probabilistic analysis of algorithms and random trees. We prove an upper tail bound for the solution using Chernoff's bounding technique by estimating the Laplace transform. The problem is traced back to the corresponding problem for binary search trees by stochastic domination. The result obtained is applied to the internal path length and Wiener index of random b-ary recursive trees with weighted edges and random linear recursive trees. Finally, lower tail bounds for the Wiener index of these trees are given.
We describe a representation of the Bolthausen-Sznitman coalescent in terms of the cutting of random recursive trees. Using this representation, we prove results concerning the final collision of the coalescent restricted to [n]: we show that the distribution of the number of blocks involved in the final collision converges as n tends to infinity, and obtain a scaling law for the sizes of these blocks. We also consider the discrete-time Markov chain giving the number of blocks after each collision of the coalescent restricted to [n]; we show that the transition probabilities of the time-revers…
Bona [2007+] studied the distribution of ascents, plateaux and descents in the class of Stirling permutations, introduced by Gessel and Stanley [1978]. Recently, Janson [2008+] showed the connection between Stirling permutations and plane recursive trees and proved a joint normal law for the parameters considered by Bona. Here we will consider generalized Stirling permutations extending the earlier results of Bona and Janson, and relate them with certain families of generalized plane recursive trees, and also $(k+1)$-ary increasing trees. We also give two different bijections between certain f…
We prove limit theorems for sums of functions of subtrees of binary search trees and random recursive trees. In particular, we give simple new proofs of the fact that the number of fringe trees of size $ k=k_n $ in the binary search tree and the random recursive tree (of total size $ n $) asymptotically has a Poisson distribution if $ k\rightarrow\infty $, and that the distribution is asymptotically normal for $ k=o(\sqrt{n}) $. Furthermore, we prove similar results for the number of subtrees of size $ k $ with some required property $ P $, for example the number of copies of a certain fixed s…
We consider stochastic processes indexed by the vertices of an infinite binary tree having a simple recursive structure. The value at any vertex is some fixed function of the values at the two daughter vertices together with some independent innovation. Endogeny means the innovations are generating. When endogeny does not hold there exist dynamics in which the innovations are held fixed while some additional randomness on the boundary of the tree is perturbed.
Given a solution to a recursive distributional equation, a natural (and non-trivial) question is whether the corresponding recursive tree process is endogenous. That is, whether the random environment almost surely defines the tree process. We propose a new method of proving endogeny, which applies to various processes. As explicit examples, we establish endogeny of the random metrics on non-pivotal hierarchical graphs defined by multiplicative cascades and of mean-field optimization problems as the mean-field matching and travelling salesman problems in pseudo-dimension q>1.
We consider a Bernoulli bond percolation on a random recursive tree of size $n\gg 1$, with supercritical parameter $p_n=1-c/\ln n$ for some $c>0$ fixed. It is known that with high probability, there exists then a unique giant cluster of size $G_n\sim \e^{-c}$, and it follows from a recent result of Schweinsberg \cite{Sch} that $G_n$ has non-gaussian fluctuations. We provide an explanation of this by analyzing the effect of percolation on different phases of the growth of recursive trees. This alternative approach may be useful for studying percolation on other classes of trees, such as for ins…
In this work we analyze bucket increasing tree families. We introduce two simple stochastic growth processes, generating random bucket increasing trees of size $n$, complementing the earlier result of Mahmoud and Smythe for bucket recursive trees. On the combinatorial side, we define multilabelled generalizations of the tree families $d$-ary increasing trees and generalized plane-oriented recursive trees. Additionally, we introduce a clustering process for ordinary increasing trees and relate it to bucket increasing trees. We discuss in detail the bucket size two and present a bijection betwee…
We study Bernoulli bond percolation on a random recursive tree of size $n$ with percolation parameter $p(n)$ converging to $1$ as $n$ tends to infinity. The sizes of the percolation clusters are naturally stored in a tree. We prove convergence in distribution of this tree to the genealogical tree of a continuous-state branching process in discrete time. As a corollary we obtain the asymptotic sizes of the largest and next largest percolation clusters, extending thereby a recent work of Bertoin (2014) which deals with cluster sizes in the supercritical regime. In a second part, we show that the…
For $n\ge 1$, let $T_n$ be a random recursive tree on the vertex set $[n]=\{1,\ldots,n\}$. Let $\mathrm{deg}_{T_n}(v)$ be the degree of vertex $v$ in $T_n$, that is, the number of children of $v$ in $T_n$. Devroye and Lu showed that the maximum degree $Δ_n$ of $T_n$ satisfies $Δ_n/\lfloor \log_2 n\rfloor \to 1$ almost surely; Goh and Schmutz showed distributional convergence of $Δ_n - \lfloor \log_2 n \rfloor$ along suitable subsequences. In this work we show how a version of Kingman's coalescent can be used to access much finer properties of the degree distribution in $T_n$. For any $i\in \ma…
Given a recursive distributional equation (RDE) and a solution $μ$ of it, we consider the tree indexed invariant process called the recursive tree process (RTP) with marginal $μ$. We introduce a new type of bivariate uniqueness property which is different from the one defined by Aldous and Bandyopadhyay (2005), and we prove that this property is equivalent to tail-triviality for the RTP, thus obtaining a necessary and sufficient condition to determine tail-triviality for a RTP in general. As an application we consider Aldous' (2000) construction of the frozen percolation process on a infinite …
Weighted recursive trees are built by adding successively vertices with predetermined weights to a tree: each new vertex is attached to a parent chosen at random with probability proportional to its weight. In the case where the total weight of the tree at step $n$ grows polynomially in $n$, we obtained in (Pain-Sénizergues 2022) an asymptotic expansion for the height of the tree, which falls into the university class of the maximum of branching random walks. In this paper, we consider the case of a total weight growing sub-polynomially in $n$ and obtain asymptotics for the height of the tree …
We consider a random process on recursive trees, with three types of events. Vertices give birth at a constant rate (growth), each edge may be removed independently (fragmentation of the tree) and clusters (or trees) are frozen with a rate proportional to their sizes (isolation of connected component). A phase transition occurs when the isolation is able to stop the growth fragmentation process and cause extinction. When the process survives, the number of clusters increases exponentially and we prove that the normalized empirical measure of clusters a.s. converges to a limit law on recursive …
We consider a recursively defined random set of points and its barycenter, where the random set is constructed by the following inductive rule: Given a realization of $n-1$ points, one of them is picked at random and serves as a source the $n$-th point. We discuss the asymptotic behaviour of the barycentre of this random set. The main analysis relies on the analsis of Hoppe trees, for which we derive a limit theorem for the joint distribution of total length and Wiener index.
We consider growing random recursive trees in random environment, in which at each step a new vertex is attached (by an edge of a random length) to an existing tree vertex according to a probability distribution that assigns the tree vertices masses proportional to their random weights. The main aim of the paper is to study the asymptotic behaviour of the distance from the newly inserted vertex to the tree's root and that of the mean numbers of outgoing vertices as the number of steps tends to infinity. Most of the results are obtained under the assumption that the random weights have a produc…
Inspired by biological evolution, we consider the following so-called accessibility percolation problem: The vertices of the unoriented $n$-dimensional binary hypercube are assigned independent $U(0, 1)$ weights, referred to as fitnesses. A path is considered accessible if fitnesses are strictly increasing along it. We prove that the probability that the global fitness maximum is accessible from the all zeroes vertex converges to $1-\frac{1}{2}\ln\left(2+\sqrt{5}\right)$ as $n\rightarrow\infty$. Moreover, we prove that if one conditions on the location of the fitness maximum being $v$, then pr…
In this note we consider the $k$th level of the uniform random recursive tree after $n$ steps, and prove that the proportion of nodes with degree greater than $t\log n$ converges to $(1-t)^k$ almost surely, as $n\to\infty$, for every $t\in(0,1)$. In addition, we show that the number of degree $d$ nodes in the first level is asymptotically Poisson distributed with mean 1; moreover, they are asymptotically independent for $d=1,2,...$.
We introduce a general recursive method to construct continuum random trees (CRTs) from independent copies of a random string of beads, that is, any random interval equipped with a random discrete probability measure, and from related structures. We prove the existence of these CRTs as a new application of the fixpoint method for recursive distribution equations formalised in high generality by Aldous and Bandyopadhyay. We apply this recursive method to show the convergence to CRTs of various tree growth processes. We note alternative constructions of existing self-similar CRTs in the sense of…
We comment on old and new results related to the destruction of a random recursive tree (RRT), in which its edges are cut one after the other in a uniform random order. In particular, we study the number of steps needed to isolate or disconnect certain distinguished vertices when the size of the tree tends to infinity. New probabilistic explanations are given in terms of the so-called cut-tree and the tree of component sizes, which both encode different aspects of the destruction process. Finally, we establish the connection to Bernoulli bond percolation on large RRT's and present recent resul…
We study the broadcasting problem when the underlying tree is a random recursive tree. The root of the tree has a random bit value assigned. Every other vertex has the same bit value as its parent with probability $1-q$ and the opposite value with probability $q$, where $q \in [0,1]$. The broadcasting problem consists in estimating the value of the root bit upon observing the unlabeled tree, together with the bit value associated with every vertex. In a more difficult version of the problem, the unlabeled tree is observed but only the bit values of the leaves are observed. When the underlying …
Interacting particle systems can often be constructed from a graphical representation, by applying local maps at the times of associated Poisson processes. This leads to a natural coupling of systems started in different initial states. We consider interacting particle systems on the complete graph in the mean-field limit, i.e., as the number of vertices tends to infinity. We are not only interested in the mean-field limit of a single process, but mainly in how several coupled processes behave in the limit. This turns out to be closely related to recursive tree processes as studied by Aldous a…
In this paper we give a new example of duality between fragmentation and coagulation operators. Consider the space of partitions of mass (i.e., decreasing sequences of nonnegative real numbers whose sum is 1) and the two-parameter family of Poisson--Dirichlet distributions $\operatorname {PD}(α,θ)$ that take values in this space. We introduce families of random fragmentation and coagulation operators $\mathrm {Frag}_α$ and $\mathrm {Coag}_{α,θ}$, respectively, with the following property: if the input to $\mathrm {Frag}_α$ has $\operatorname {PD}(α,θ)$ distribution, then the output has $\opera…
Let $r$ and $d$ be positive integers with $r<d$. Consider a random $d$-ary tree constructed as follows. Start with a single vertex, and in each time-step choose a uniformly random leaf and give it $d$ newly created offspring. Let ${\mathcal T}_t$ be the tree produced after $t$ steps. We show that there exists a fixed $δ<1$ depending on $d$ and $r$ such that almost surely for all large $t$, every $r$-ary subtree of ${\mathcal T}_t$ has less than $t^δ$ vertices. The proof involves analysis that also yields a related result. Consider the following iterative construction of a random planar triangu…
We consider random recursive trees that are grown via community modulated schemes that involve random attachment or degree based attachment. The aim of this paper is to derive general techniques based on continuous time embedding to study such models. The associated continuous time embeddings are not branching processes: individual reproductive rates at each time depend on the composition of the entire population at that time. Using stochastic analytic techniques we show that various key macroscopic statistics of the continuous time embedding stabilize, allowing asymptotics for a host of funct…
Consider a Crump-Mode-Jagers process generated by an increasing random walk whose increments have finite second moment. Let $Y_k(t)$ be the number of individuals in generation $k\in \mathbb N$ born in the time interval $[0,t]$. We prove a law of the iterated logarithm for $Y_k(t)$ with fixed $k$, as $t\to +\infty$. As a consequence, we derive a law of the iterated logarithm for the number of vertices at a fixed level $k$ in a random recursive tree, as the number of vertices goes to $\infty$.
Let $X_n(k)$ be the number of vertices at level $k$ in a random recursive tree with $n+1$ vertices. We prove a functional limit theorem for the vector-valued process $(X_{[n^t]}(1),\ldots, X_{[n^t]}(k))_{t\geq 0}$, for each $k\in\mathbb N$. We show that after proper centering and normalization, this process converges weakly to a vector-valued Gaussian process whose components are integrated Brownian motions. This result is deduced from a functional limit theorem for Crump-Mode-Jagers branching processes generated by increasing random walks with increments that have finite second moment.
We consider random dynamics on a uniform random recursive tree with $n$ vertices. Successively, in a uniform random order, each edge is either set on fire with some probability $p_n$ or fireproof with probability $1-p_n$. Fires propagate in the tree and are only stopped by fireproof edges. We first consider the proportion of burnt and fireproof vertices as $n\to\infty$, and prove a phase transition when $p_n$ is of order $\ln n/n$. We then study the connectivity of the fireproof forest, more precisely the existence of a giant component. We finally investigate the sizes of the burnt subtrees.
A weighted recursive tree is an evolving tree in which vertices are assigned random vertex-weights and new vertices connect to a predecessor with a probability proportional to its weight. Here, we study the maximum degree and near-maximum degrees in weighted recursive trees when the vertex-weights are almost surely bounded and their distribution function satisfies a mild regularity condition near zero. We are able to specify higher-order corrections to the first order growth of the maximum degree established in prior work. The accuracy of the results depends on the behaviour of the weight dist…
In this paper, several properties of plain-oriented recursive trees (PORTs) are uncovered. Specifically, we investigate the degree profile of a PORT by determining the exact probability mass function of the degree of a node with a fixed label. We compute the expectation and variance of the degree variable via a \Polya\ urn approach. In addition, we look into a topological index, the Zagreb index, of this class of trees. We calculate the exact first two moments of the Zagreb index by using recurrence methods. We also provide several evidence in favor of our conjecture that the Zagreb index of P…
Distinguishing between continuous and first-order phase transitions is a major challenge in random discrete systems. We study the topic for events with recursive structure on Galton-Watson trees. For example, let $\mathcal{T}_1$ be the event that a Galton-Watson tree is infinite, and let $\mathcal{T}_2$ be the event that it contains an infinite binary tree starting from its root. These events satisfy similar recursive properties: $\mathcal{T}_1$ holds if and only if $\mathcal{T}_1$ holds for at least one of the trees initiated by children of the root, and $\mathcal{T}_2$ holds if and only if $…
We provide a new characterisation of Duquesne and Le Gall's $α$-stable tree, $α\in(1,2]$, as the solution of a recursive distribution equation (RDE) of the form $\mathcal{T}\overset{d}{=}g(ξ,\mathcal{T}_i, i\geq0)$, where $g$ is a concatenation operator, $ξ= (ξ_i, i\geq 0)$ a sequence of scaling factors, $\mathcal{T}_i$, $i \geq 0$, and $\mathcal{T}$ are i.i.d. trees independent of $ξ$. This generalises a version of the well-known characterisation of the Brownian Continuum Random Tree due to Aldous, Albenque and Goldschmidt. By relating to previous results on a rather different class of RDE, w…
In the recursive lamination of the disk, one tries to add chords one after another at random; a chord is kept and inserted if it does not intersect any of the previously inserted ones. Curien and Le Gall [Ann. Probab. 39 (2011) 2224-2270] have proved that the set of chords converges to a limit triangulation of the disk encoded by a continuous process $\mathscr{M}$. Based on a new approach resembling ideas from the so-called contraction method in function spaces, we prove that, when properly rescaled, the planar dual of the discrete lamination converges almost surely in the Gromov-Hausdorff sen…
We consider a natural destruction process of an infinite recursive tree by removing each edge after an independent exponential time. The destruction up to time t is encoded by a partition $Π$(t) of N into blocks of connected vertices. Despite the lack of exchangeability, just like for an exchangeable fragmentation process, the process $Π$ is Markovian with transitions determined by a splitting rates measure r. However, somewhat surprisingly, r fails to fulfill the usual integrability condition for the dislocation measure of exchangeable fragmentations. We further observe that a time-dependent …
