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 long range dependence regimes, one for $β>d/(d+α)$, which coincides with the case of finite variance branching $(β=1)$, and another one for $β\leq d/(d+α)$, where the long range dependence depends on the value of $β$. The long range dependence is characterized by a dependence exponent $κ$ which describes the asymptotic behavior of the codifference of increments of $ξ$ on intervals far apart, and which is $d/α$ for the first case (and for $α=2$) and $(1+β-d/(d+α))d/α$ for the second one. The convergence proofs use techniques of $\mathcal{S}'(\mathbb {R}^d)$-valued processes.
We observe the Galton-Watson Branching Processes. Limit properties of transition functions and their convergence to invariant measures are investigated.
Functional limit theorems are presented for the rescaled occupation time fluctuations process of a critical finite variance branching particle system in $R^d$ with symmetric a-stable motion starting off from either a standard Poisson random field or from the equilibrium distribution for intermediate dimensions a<d<2a. The limit processes are determined sub-fractional and fractional Brownian motion respectively.
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.
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…
This article extends the results of Fang & Zeitouni (2012a) on branching random walks (BRWs) with Gaussian increments in time inhomogeneous environments. We treat the case where the variance of the increments changes a finite number of times at different scales in [0,1] under a slight restriction. We find the asymptotics of the maximum up to an OP(1) error and show how the profile of the variance influences the leading order and the logarithmic correction term. A more general result was independently obtained by Mallein (2015b) when the law of the increments is not necessarily Gaussian. Howeve…
We continue our study of the distribution of the maximal number $X^{\ast}_k$ of offsprings amongst all individuals in a critical Galton-Watson process started with $k$ ancestors, treating the case when the reproduction law has a regularly varying tail $\bar F$ with index $-α$ for $α>2$ (and hence finite variance). We show that $X^{\ast}_k$ suitably normalized converges in distribution to a Frechet law with shape parameter $α/2$; this contrasts sharply with the case $1<α<2$ when the variance is infinite. More generally, we obtain a weak limit theorem for the offspring sequence ranked in the dec…
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 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 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 study the maximal displacement of branching random walks in a class of time inhomogeneous environments. Specifically, binary branching random walks with Gaussian increments will be considered, where the variances of the increments change over time macroscopically. We find the asymptotics of the maximum up to an $O_P(1)$ (stochastically bounded) error, and focus on the following phenomena: the profile of the variance matters, both to the leading (velocity) term and to the logarithmic correction term, and the latter exhibits a phase transition.
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 consider a model of Branching Brownian Motion with time-inhomogeneous variance of the form σ(t/T), where σis a strictly decreasing function. Fang and Zeitouni (2012) showed that the maximal particle's position M_T is such that M_T-v_σT is negative of order T^{-1/3}, where v_σis the integral of the function σover the interval [0,1]. In this paper, we refine we refine this result and show the existence of a function m_T, such that M_T-m_T converges in law, as T\to\infty. Furthermore, m_T=v_σT - w_σT^{1/3} - σ(1)\log T + O(1) with w_σ= 2^{-1/3}α_1 \int_0^1 σ(s)^{1/3} |σ'(s)|^{2/3}\,\dd s. Here…
The asymptotic normality of conditional least squares estimators for the offspring variance in critical branching processes with non-homogeneous immigration is established, under moment assumptions on both reproduction and immigration. The proofs use martingale techniques and weak convergence results in Skorokhod spaces.
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 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 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 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 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…
A class of branching processes in varying environments is exhibited which become extinct almost surely even though the means M_n grow fast enough so that sum M_n^{-1} is finite. In fact, such a process is constructed for every offspring distribution of infinite variance, and this establishes the converse of a previously known fact: that if a distribution has finite variance then sum M_n^{-1}=infty is equivalent to almost sure extinction. This has as an immediate consequence the converse to a theorem on equipolarity of Galton-Watson trees.
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 …
We consider a branching random walk initiated by a single particle at location 0 in which particles alternately reproduce according to the law of a Galton-Watson process and disperse according to the law of a driftless random walk on the integers. When the offspring distribution has mean 1 the branching process is critical, and therefore dies out with probability 1. We prove that if the particle jump distribution has mean zero, positive finite variance $η^{2}$, and finite $4+\varepsilon$ moment, and if the offspring distribution has positive variance $σ^{2}$ and finite third moment then the di…
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 prove a general fluctuation limit theorem for Galton-Watson branching processes with immigration. The limit is a time-inhomogeneous OU type process driven by a spectrally positive Levy process. As applications of this result, we obtain some asymptotic estimates for the conditional least-squares estimator of the offspring means and variances of the offspring and immigration distributions.
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 p…
Concentration inequalities are obtained on Poisson space, for random functionals with finite or infinite variance. In particular, dimension free tail estimates and exponential integrability results are given for the Euclidean norm of vectors of independent functionals. In the finite variance case these results are applied to infinitely divisible random variables such as quadratic Wiener functionals, including Lévy's stochastic area and the square norm of Brownian paths. In the infinite variance case, various tail estimates such as stable ones are also presented.
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…
The so-called "supOU" processes, namely the superpositions of Ornstein-Uhlenbeck type processes are stationary processes for which one can specify separately the marginal distribution and the dependence structure. They can have finite or infinite variance. We study the limit behavior of integrated infinite variance supOU processes adequately normalized. Depending on the specific circumstances, the limit can be fractional Brownian motion but it can also be a process with infinite variance, a Lévy stable process with independent increments or a stable process with dependent increments. We show t…
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 analyse the splitting algorithm performance in the estimation of rare event probabilities and this in a discrete multidimensional framework. For this we assume that each threshold is partitioned into disjoint subsets and the probability for a particle to reach the next threshold will depend on the starting subset. A straightforward estimator of the rare event probability is given by the proportion of simulated particles for which the rare event occurs. The variance of this estimator we get is the sum of two parts: one part resuming the variability due to each threshold and a second part res…
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 $K$ …
In this paper we study the genealogical structure of a Galton-Watson process with neutral mutations, where the initial population is large and mutation rate is small \cite{B2}. Namely, we extend in two directions the results obtained in Bertoin's work. In the critical case, we construct the version of Bertoin's model conditioned not to be extinct, and in the case with finite variance we show convergence after normalization, of allelic sub-populations towards a tree indexed CSBP with immigration. Besides, we establish the version of the limit theorems in \cite{B2}, been for the unconditioned pr…
Some probabilistic aspects of the number variance statistic are investigated. Infinite systems of independent Brownian motions and symmetric alpha-stable processes are used to construct new examples of processes which exhibit both divergent and saturating number variance behaviour. We derive a general expression for the number variance for the spatial particle configurations arising from these systems and this enables us to deduce various limiting distribution results for the fluctuations of the associated counting functions. In particular, knowledge of the number variance allows us to introdu…
SupOU processes are superpositions of Ornstein-Uhlenbeck type processes with a random intensity parameter. They are stationary processes whose marginal distribution and dependence structure can be specified independently. Integrated supOU processes have then stationary increments and satisfy central and non-central limit theorems. Their moments, however, can display an unusual behavior known as "intermittency". We show here that intermittency can also appear when the processes have a heavy tailed marginal distribution and, in particular, an infinite variance.
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…
Consider bond percolation on the square lattice. Let ${\cal C}$ be the incipient infinite cluster with the incipient measure $ν$. If a one-arm path exponent exists and equals $5/48$, it is well known that $E_ν|{\cal C}\cup [-n,n]^2| = n^{ 91/48+o(1)}$. In this paper, we focus on the variance of $|{\cal C}\cup [-n,n]^2|$ and show that $σ^2_ν(|{\cal C}\cup [-n,n]^2|)= n^{91/24+o(1)}$.
We consider the standard model of i.i.d. bond percolation on $\mathbb Z^d$ of parameter $p$. When $p>p_c$, there exists almost surely a unique infinite cluster $\mathcal C_p$. Using the recent techniques of Cerf and Dembin, we prove that the variance of the graph distance in $\mathcal C_p$ between two points of $\mathcal C_p$ is sublinear. The main result extends the works of Benjamini, Kalai and Schramm, Benaim and Rossignol and Damron, Hanson and Sosoe for the study of the variance of passage times in first passage percolation without moment conditions on the edge-weight distribution.
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.
In this paper we consider a triangular array of branching processes with non-stationary immigration. We prove a weak convergence of properly normalized branching processes with immigration to deterministic function under assumption that immigration is rowwise $ψ-$mixing and the offspring mean tends to its critical value 1, immigration mean and variance controlled by regularly varying functions. Moreover, we obtain a fluctuation limit theorem for branching process with immigration when immigration is $m-$dependent where $m$ may tend to infinity with the row index at a certain rate. In this case…
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 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.
In the paper we continue to investigate measures of dependence for random variables with infinite variance. The asymptotic of spectral covariance $ρ(X_{(0,0)}, X_{(k_1,k_2)})$ for linear random field $X_{k,l}=\sum_{i,j=0}^\infty c_{i,j}ε_{k-i, l-j}, \ (k, l)\in \mathbb{Z}^2,$ with special form of filter $\{c_{i,j}\}$ and with innovations $\{ ε_{i, j}\}$ having infinite second moment is investigated. Different behavior of $ρ(X_{(0,0)}, X_{(k_1,k_2)})$ is obtained in the cases $n\to \infty, \ m\to \infty$ and $n\to \infty, \ m\to -\infty$, the latter case being much more complicated.
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 consider functionals of long-range dependent Gaussian sequences with infinite variance and obtain nonstandard limit theorems. When the long-range dependence is strong enough, the limit is a Hermite process, while for weaker long-range dependence, the limit is $α$-stable Lévy motion. For the critical value of the long-range dependence parameter, the limit is a sum of a Hermite process and $α$-stable Lévy motion.
We consider a conditionally Poissonian random graph model where the mean degrees, `capacities', follow a power-tailed distribution with finite mean and infinite variance. Such a graph of size $N$ has a giant component which is super-small in the sense that the typical distance between vertices is of the order of $\log\log N$. The shortest paths travel through a core consisting of nodes with high mean degrees. In this paper we derive upper bounds of the typical distance when an upper part of the core is removed, including the case that the whole core is removed.
We consider a measure of dependence for symmetric $α$-stable random vectors, which was introduced by the author in 1976. We demonstrate that this measure of dependence can be extended for much more broad class of random vectors (up to regularly varying vectors in separable Banach spaces). This measure is applied for linear random processes and fields with heavy-tailed innovations, for some stable processes, and these applications show that this dependence measure, named as $α$-covariance is a good substitute for the usual covariance. Also we discuss a problem of defining long, short, and negat…
We study branching diffusions in a bounded domain $D$ of $\mathbb{R}^d$ in which particles are killed upon hitting the boundary $\partial D$. It is known that any such process undergoes a phase transition when the branching rate $β$ exceeds a critical value: a multiple of the first eigenvalue of the generator of the diffusion. We investigate the system at criticality and show that the associated genealogical tree, when the process is conditioned to survive for a long time, converges to Aldous' Continuum Random Tree under appropriate rescaling. The result holds under only a mild assumption on t…
Let $\left\{ Z(t), t\geq 0\right\} $ be a critical Bellman-Harris branching process with finite variance for the offspring size of particles. Assuming that $0<Z(t)\leq φ(t)$, where either $φ(t)=o(t)$ as $t\rightarrow \infty $ or $φ(t)=at,\, a>0$, we study the structure of the process $% \left\{ Z(s,t),0\leq s\leq t\right\} ,$ where $Z(s,t)$ is the number of particles in the process at moment $s$ in the initial process which either survive up to moment $t$ or have a positive offspring number at this moment.
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…
