We study the evolution of states of an infinite system of point particles dwelling in a locally compact Polish space $X$. Each particle produces at random a finite `cloud' of offsprings distributed over $X$ according to some law, and disappears afterwards. The system's states are probability measures on an appropriate space of locally finite counting measures on $X$. Their evolution is obtained by solving the corresponding Fokker-Planck equation. We prove that this equation has a unique solution and discuss some of its properties. Our pivotal idea of dealing with infinite systems consists in passing to tempered counting measures by imposing appropriate restrictions on the branching. In this approach, we first solve a nonlinear evolution equation in the space of bounded continuous functions on $X$ -- so called log-Laplace equation. Next we solve the Kolmogorov equation which is then used to solve the Fokker-Planck equation and thus describe the evolution in question.
A family of continuous-state branching processes with immigration are constructed as the solution flow of a stochastic equation system driven by time-space noises. The family can be regarded as an inhomogeneous increasing path-valued branching process with immigration. Two nonlocal branching immigration superprocesses can be defined from the flow. We identify explicitly the branching and immigration mechanisms of those processes. The results provide new perspectives into the tree-valued Markov processes of Aldous and Pitman [Ann. Inst. Henri Poincaré Probab. Stat. 34 (1998) 637-686] and Abraha…
For many stochastic diffusion processes with mean field interaction, convergence of the rescaled total mass processes towards a diffusion process is known. Here we show convergence of the so-called finite system scheme for interacting jump-type processes known as mutually catalytic branching processes with infinite branching rate. Due to the lack of second moments the rescaling of time is different from the finite rate mutually catalytic case. The limit of rescaled total mass processes is identified as the finite rate mutually catalytic branching diffusion. The convergence of rescaled processe…
We construct a mutually catalytic branching process on a countable site space with infinite "branching rate". The finite rate mutually catalytic model, in which the rate of branching of one population at a site is proportional to the mass of the other population at that site, was introduced by Dawson and Perkins in [DP98]. We show that our model is the limit for a class of models and in particular for the Dawson-Perkins model as the rate of branching goes to infinity. Our process is characterized as the unique solution to a martingale problem. We also give a characterization of the process as …
We observe the Galton-Watson Branching Processes. Limit properties of transition functions and their convergence to invariant measures are investigated.
We consider an indecomposable Galton-Watson branching process with countably infinitely many types. Assuming that the process is critical and allowing for infinite variance of the offspring sizes of some (or all) types of particles we describe the asymptotic behavior of the survival probability of the process and establish a Yaglom-type conditional limit theorem for the infinite-dimensional vector of the number of particles of all types.
Consider the infinite rate mutually catalytic branching process (IMUB) constructed in [Infinite rate mutually catalytic branching in infinitely many colonies. Construction, characterization and convergence (2008) Preprint] and [Ann. Probab. 38 (2010) 479-497]. For finite initial conditions, we show that only one type survives in the long run if the interaction kernel is recurrent. On the other hand, under a slightly stronger condition than transience, we show that both types can coexist.
We investigate an application of slowly varying functions (in sense of Karamata) in the theory of Markov branching process. We treat the critical case so that the infinitesimal generating function of the process has the infinite second moment, but it regularly varies with the remainder. We improve the Basic Lemma of the theory of critical Markov branching process and refine known limit results.
We call a random point measure infinitely ramified if for every $n\in \mathbb N$, it has the same distribution as the $n$-th generation of some branching random walk. On the other hand, branching Lévy processes model the evolution of a population in continuous time, such that individuals move in space independently, according to some Lévy process, and further beget progenies according to some Poissonian dynamics, possibly on an everywhere dense set of times. Our main result connects these two classes of processes much in the same way as in the case of infinitely divisible distributions and Lév…
We study the branching random walk on weighted graphs; site-breeding and edge-breeding branching random walks on graphs are seen as particular cases. We describe the strong critical value in terms of a geometrical parameter of the graph. We characterize the weak critical value and relate it to another geometrical parameter. We prove that, at the strong critical value, the process dies out locally almost surely; while, at the weak critical value, global survival and global extinction are both possible.
We discuss the definition and measurability questions of random fractals and find under certain conditions a formula for upper and lower Minkowski dimensions. For the case of a random self-similar set we obtain the packing dimension.
We consider a particle system in continuous time, discrete population, with spatial motion and nonlocal branching. The offspring's weights and their number may depend on the mother's weight. Our setting captures, for instance, the processes indexed by a Galton-Watson tree. Using a size-biased auxiliary process for the empirical measure, we determine this asymptotic behaviour. We also obtain a large population approximation as weak solution of a growth-fragmentation equation. Several examples illustrate our results.
The symbiotic branching model describes a spatial population consisting of two types that are allowed to migrate in space and branch locally only if both types are present. We continue our investigation of the large scale behaviour of the system started in Blath, Hammer and Ortgiese (2016), where we showed that the continuum system converges after diffusive rescaling. Inspired by a scaling property of the continuum model, a series of earlier works initiated by Klenke and Mytnik (2010, 2012) studied the model on a discrete space, but with infinite branching rate. In this paper, we bridge the ga…
Consider the mutually catalytic branching process with finite branching rate $γ$. We show that as $γ\to\infty$, this process converges in finite-dimensional distributions (in time) to a certain discontinuous process. We give descriptions of this process in terms of its semigroup in terms of the infinitesimal generator and as the solution of a martingale problem. We also give a strong construction in terms of a planar Brownian motion from which we infer a path property of the process. This is the first paper in a series or three, wherein we also construct an interacting version of this process …
In the paper the rescaled occupation time fluctuation process of a certain empirical system is investigated. The system consists of particles evolving independently according to α-stable motion in R^d, α<d<2α. The particles split according to the binary critical branching law with intensity V>0. We study how the limit behaviour of the fluctuations of the occupation time depends on the \emph{initial particle configuration}. We obtain a functional central limit theorem for a vast class of infinitely divisible distributions. Our findings extend and put in a unified setting results which previousl…
Subcritical catalytic branching random walk on d-dimensional lattice is studied. New theorems concerning the asymptotic behavior of distributions of local particles numbers are established. To prove the results different approaches are used including the connection between fractional moments of random variables and fractional derivatives of their Laplace transforms. In the previous papers on this subject only supercritical and critical regimes were investigated assuming finiteness of the first moment of offspring number and finiteness of the variance of offspring number, respectively. In the p…
Consider a population of infinitesimally small frogs on the real line. Initially the frogs on the positive half-line are dormant while those on the negative half-line are awake and move according to the heat flow. At the interface, the incoming wake frogs try to wake up the dormant frogs and succeed with a probability proportional to their amount among the total amount of involved frogs at the specific site. Otherwise, the incoming frogs also fall asleep. This frog model is a special case of the infinite rate symbiotic branching process on the real line with different motion speeds for the two…
We establish limit theorems for the fluctuations of the rescaled occupation time of a $(d,α,β)$-branching particle system. It consists of particles moving according to a symmetric $α$-stable motion in $\mathbb{R}^d$. The branching law is in the domain of attraction of a (1+$β$)-stable law and the initial condition is an equilibrium random measure for the system (defined below). In the paper we treat separately the cases of intermediate $α/β<d<(1+β)α/β$, critical $d=(1+β)α/β$ and large $d>(1+β)α/β$ dimensions. In the most interesting case of intermediate dimensions we obtain a version of a frac…
We are interested in predator-prey dynamics on infinite trees, which can informally be seen as particular two-type branching processes where individuals may die (or be infected) only after their parent dies (or is infected). We study two types of such dynamics: the chase-escape process, introduced by Kordzakhia with a variant by Bordenave, and the birth-and-assassination process, introduced by Aldous & Krebs. We exhibit a coupling between these processes and branching random walks starting from a random point and killed at the barrier 0. This sheds new light on the chase-escape and birth-and-a…
We study a queueing system with Poisson arrivals on a bus line indexed by integers. The buses move at constant speed to the right and the time of service per customer getting on the bus is fixed. The customers arriving at station i wait for a bus if this latter is less than d\_i stations before, where d\_i is non-decreasing. We determine the asymptotic behavior of a single bus and when two buses eventually coalesce almost surely by coupling arguments. Three regimes appear, two of which leading to a.s. coalescing of the buses.The approach relies on a connection with aged structured branching pr…
Dawson and Perkins [Ann. Probab. 26 (1988) 1088--1138] constructed a stochastic model of an interacting two-type population indexed by a countable site space which locally undergoes a mutually catalytic branching mechanism. In Klenke and Mytnik [Preprint (2008), arXiv:0901.0623], it is shown that as the branching rate approaches infinity, the process converges to a process that is called the infinite rate mutually catalytic branching process (IMUB). It is most conveniently characterized as the solution of a certain martingale problem. While in the latter reference, a noise equation approach is…
We study the extremes of branching random walks under the assumption that the underlying Galton-Watson tree has infinite progeny mean. It is assumed that the displacements are either regularly varying or they have lighter tails. In the regularly varying case, it is shown that the point process sequence of normalized extremes converges to a Poisson random measure. We study the asymptotics of the scaled position of the rightmost particle in the $n$-th generation when the tail of the displacement behaves like $\exp(-K(x))$, where either $K$ is a regularly varying function of index $r> 0$, or $K$ …
Using Foster-Lyapunov techniques we establish new conditions on non-extinction, non-explosion, coming down from infinity and staying infinite, respectively, for the general continuous-state nonlinear branching processes introduced in Li et al. (2019). These results can be applied to identify boundary behaviors for the critical cases of the above nonlinear branching processes with power rate functions driven by Brownian motion and (or) stable Poisson random measure, which was left open in Li et al. (2019). In particular, we show that even in the critical cases, a phase transition happens betwee…
We consider a Galton-Watson process $\mathbf{Z}% (n)=(Z_{1}(n),Z_{2}(n))$ with two types of particles. Particles of type 2 may produce offspring of both types while particles of type 1 may produce particles of their own type only. Let $Z_{i}(m,n)$ be the number of particles of type $i$ at time $m<n$ having offspring at time $n$. Assuming that the process is critical and that the variance of the offspring distribution may be infinite we describe the asymptotic behavior, as $m,n\rightarrow \infty $ of the law of $\mathbf{Z}(m,n)=(Z_1(m,n),Z_2(m,n))$ given $\mathbf{Z}(n)\neq \mathbf{0}$. We find …
We investigate the branching structure coded by the excursion above zero of a spectrally positive Levy process. The main idea is to identify the level of the Levy excursion as the time and count the number of jumps upcrossing the level. By regarding the size of a jump as the birth site of a particle, we construct a branching particle system in which the particles undergo nonlocal branchings and deterministic spatial motions to the left on the positive half line. A particle is removed from the system as soon as it reaches the origin. Then a measure-valued Borel right Markov process can be defin…
The long-term behaviors of flows of continuous-state branching processes are characterized through subordinators and extremal processes. The extremal processes arise in the case of supercritical processes with infinite mean and of subcritical processes with infinite variation. The jumps of these extremal processes are interpreted as specific initial individuals whose progenies overwhelm the population. These individuals, which correspond to the records of a certain Poisson point process embedded in the flow, are called super-individuals. They radically increase the growth rate to $+\infty$ in …
We prove limit theorems for rescaled occupation time fluctuations of a (d,alpha,beta)-branching particle system (particles moving in R^d according to a spherically symmetric alpha-stable Levy process, (1+beta)-branching, 0<beta<1, uniform Poisson initial state), in the cases of critical dimension, d=alpha(1+beta)/beta, and large dimensions, d>alpha(1+beta)/beta. The fluctuation processes are continuous but their limits are stable processes with independent increments, which have jumps. The convergence is in the sense of finite-dimensional distributions, and also of space-time random fields (ti…
We establish a connection between the uniform infinite planar triangulation and some critical time-reversed branching process. This allows to find a scaling limit for the principal boundary component of a ball of radius R for large R (i.e. for a boundary component separating the ball from infinity). We show also that outside of R-ball a contour exists that has length linear in R.
We extend the class of $(ξ,ψ,K)$-superprocesses known so far by applying a simple transformation induced by a \lq\lq weight function\rq\rq\ for the one-particle motion. These transformed superprocesses may exist under weak conditions on the branching parameters, and their state space automatically extends to a certain space of possibly infinite Radon measures. It turns out that a number of superprocesses which were so far not included in the general theory fall into this class. For instance, we are able to extend the hyperbolic branching catalyst of Fleischmann and Mueller to the case of $β$-b…
We study the impact on shape parameters of an underlying Bienaymé-Galton-Watson branching process (height, width and first hitting time), of having a non-spatial branching mechanism with infinite variance. Aiming at providing a comparative study of the spread of an epidemics whose dynamics is given by the modulus of a branching Brownian motion (BBM) we then consider spatial branching processes in dimension d, not necessarily integer. The underlying branching mechanism is then either a binary branching model or one presenting infinite variance. In particular we evaluate the chance p(x) of being…
We prove local convergence results of rerooted conditioned multi-type Galton--Watson trees. The limit objects are multitype variants of the random sin-tree constructed by Aldous (1991), and differ according to which types recur infinitely often along the backwards growing spine.
We consider branching random walks and contact processes on infinite, connected, locally finite graphs whose reproduction and infectivity rates across edges are inversely proportional to vertex degree. We show that when the ambient graph is a Galton-Watson tree then, in certain circumstances, the branching random walks and contact processes will have weak survival phases. We also provide bounds on critical values.
Branching process approximation to the initial stages of an epidemic process has been used since the 1950's as a technique for providing stochastic counterparts to deterministic epidemic threshold theorems. One way of describing the approximation is to construct both branching and epidemic processes on the same probability space, in such a way that their paths coincide for as long as possible. In this paper, it is shown, in the context of a Markovian model of parasitic infection, that coincidence can be achieved with asymptotically high probability until o(N^{2/3}) infections have occurred, wh…
We prove a functional limit theorem for the rescaled occupation time fluctuations of a $(d,α,β)$-branching particle system [particles moving in $\mathbb {R}^d$ according to a symmetric $α$-stable Lévy process, branching law in the domain of attraction of a $(1+β)$-stable law, $0<β<1$, uniform Poisson initial state] in the case of intermediate dimensions, $α/β<d<α(1+β)/β$. The limit is a process of the form $Kλξ$, where $K$ is a constant, $λ$ is the Lebesgue measure on $\mathbb {R}^d$, and $ξ=(ξ_t)_{t\geq0}$ is a $(1+β)$-stable process which has long range dependence. For $α<2$, there are two l…
A competition process on $\mathbb{Z}^d$ is considered, where two species compete to color the sites. The entities are driven by branching random walks. Specifically red (blue) particles reproduce in discrete time and place offspring according to a given reproduction law, which may be different for the two types. When a red (blue) particle is placed at a site that has not been occupied by any particle before, the site is colored red (blue) and keeps this color forever. The types interact in that, when a particle is placed at a site of opposite color, the particle adopts the color of the site wi…
Infinite sums of i.i.d. random variables discounted by a multiplicative random walk are called perpetuities and have been studied by many authors. The present paper provides a log-type moment result for such random variables under minimal conditions which is then utilized for the study of related moments of a.s. limits of certain martingales associated with the supercritical branching random walk. The connection, first observed by the second author in [Iksanov, A.M. (2004). Elementary fixed points of the BRW smoothing transforms with infinite number of summands. Stoch. Proc. Appl. 114, 27-50.]…
The goal of this work is to decompose random populations with a genealogy in subfamilies of a given degree of kinship and to obtain a notion of infinitely divisible genealogies. We model the genealogical structure of a population by (equivalence classes of) ultrametric measure spaces (um-spaces) as elements of the Polish space U which we recall. In order to then analyze the family structure in this coding we introduce an algebraic structure on um-spaces (a consistent collection of semigroups). This allows us to obtain a path of collections of subfamilies of fixed kinship h (described as ultram…
Random-cluster measures on infinite regular trees are studied in conjunction with a general type of `boundary condition', namely an equivalence relation on the set of infinite paths of the tree. The uniqueness and non-uniqueness of random-cluster measures are explored for certain classes of equivalence relations. In proving uniqueness, the following problem concerning branching processes is encountered and answered. Consider bond percolation on the family-tree $T$ of a branching process. What is the probability that every infinite path of $T$, beginning at its root, contains some vertex which …
We show that the electrical resistance between the origin and generation n of the incipient infinite oriented branching random walk in dimensions d<6 is O(n^{1-alpha}) for some universal constant alpha>0. This answers a question of Barlow, Járai, Kumagai and Slade [2].
We study rooted planar random trees with a probability distribution which is proportional to a product of weight factors $w_n$ associated to the vertices of the tree and depending only on their individual degrees $n$. We focus on the case when $w_n$ grows faster than exponentially with $n$. In this case the measures on trees of finite size $N$ converge weakly as $N$ tends to infinity to a measure which is concentrated on a single tree with one vertex of infinite degree. For explicit weight factors of the form $w_n=((n-1)!)^α$ with $α>0$ we obtain more refined results about the approach to the …
