In this paper, we study quasi-stationarity for a large class of Kolmogorov diffusions. The main novelty here is that we allow the drift to go to $- \infty$ at the origin, and the diffusion to have an entrance boundary at $+\infty$. These diffusions arise as images, by a deterministic map, of generalized Feller diffusions, which themselves are obtained as limits of rescaled birth--death processes. Generalized Feller diffusions take nonnegative values and are absorbed at zero in finite time with probability 1. An important example is the logistic Feller diffusion. We give sufficient conditions on the drift near 0 and near $+ \infty$ for the existence of quasi-stationary distributions, as well as rate of convergence in the Yaglom limit and existence of the $Q$-process. We also show that under these conditions, there is exactly one quasi-stationary distribution, and that this distribution attracts all initial distributions under the conditional evolution, if and only if $+\infty$ is an entrance boundary. In particular this gives a sufficient condition for the uniqueness of quasi-stationary distributions. In the proofs spectral theory plays an important role on $L^2$ of the reference measure for the killed process.
For spectrally positive Lévy processes killed on exiting the half-line, existence of a quasi-stationary distribution is characterized by the exponential integrability of the exit time, the Laplace exponent and the non-negativity of the scale functions. It is proven that if there is a quasi-stationary distribution, there are necessarily infinitely many ones and the set of quasi-stationary distributions is characterized. A sufficient condition for the minimal quasi-stationary distribution to be the Yaglom limit is given.
We analyze the connection between selection principles in front propagation and quasi-stationary distributions. We describe the missing link through the microscopic models known as Branching Brownian Motion with selection and Fleming-Viot.
We consider quasi-stationary distributions for one-dimensional diffusions via the renewal dynamical approach. We show that convergence of the iterative renewal transform to quasi-stationary distributions is equivalent to a condition on the moment growth rate of the lifetime, which is at the same time a necessary condition for the existence of Yaglom limits.
Suppose that $X$ is a subcritical superprocess. Under some asymptotic conditions on the mean semigroup of $X$, we prove the Yaglom limit of $X$ exists and identify all quasi-stationary distributions of $X$.
Let $X$ be an irreducible symmetric Markov process with the strong Feller property. We assume, in addition, that $X$ is explosive and has a tightness property. We then prove the existence and uniqueness of quasi-stationary distributions of $X$.
Convergence to non-minimal quasi-stationary distributions for one-dimensional diffusions is studied. We give a method of reducing the convergence to the tail behavior of the lifetime via a property which we call the first hitting uniqueness. We apply the results to Kummer diffusions with negative drifts and give a class of initial distributions converging to each non-minimal quasi-stationary distribution.
We study the long time behaviour of a Markov process evolving in $\mathbb{N}$ and conditioned not to hit 0. Assuming that the process comes back quickly from infinity, we prove that the process admits a unique quasi-stationary distribution (in particular, the distribution of the conditioned process admits a limit when time goes to infinity). Moreover, we prove that the distribution of the process converges exponentially fast in total variation norm to its quasi-stationary distribution and we provide an explicit rate of convergence. As a first application of our result, we bring a new insight o…
We show the existence of non-trivial quasi-stationary measures for conservative attractive particle systems on $\ZZ^d$ conditioned on avoiding an increasing local set $\A$. Moreover, we exhibit a sequence of measures $\{ν_n\}$, whose $ω$-limit set consists of quasi-stationary measures. For zero range processes, with stationary measure $\nur$, we prove the existence of an $L^2(\nur)$ nonnegative eigenvector for the generator with Dirichlet boundary on $\A$, after establishing a priori bounds on the $\{ν_n\}$.
In this note we prove that the speed of convergence of the workload of a Lévy-driven queue to the quasi-stationary distribution is of order $1/t$. We identify also the Laplace transform of the measure giving this speed and provide some examples.
We show that the quasi-stationary distribution of the subcritical contact process on $\mathbb{Z}^d$ is unique. This is in contrast with other processes which also do not come down from infinity, like stable queues and Galton-Watson, and it seems to be the first such example.
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.
In the setting of stochastic dynamical systems that eventually go extinct, the quasi-stationary distributions are useful to understand the long-term behavior of a system before evanescence. For a broad class of applicable continuous-time Markov processes on countably infinite state spaces, known as reaction networks, we introduce the inferred notion of absorbing and endorsed sets, and obtain sufficient conditions for the existence and uniqueness of a quasi-stationary distribution within each such endorsed set. In particular, we obtain sufficient conditions for the existence of a globally attra…
We characterise all the quasi-stationary distributions and the Q-process associated with a continuous state branching process that explodes in finite time. We also provide a rescaling for the continuous state branching process conditioned on non-explosion when the branching mechanism is regularly varying at 0.
For downward skip-free continuous-time Markov chains on non-negative integers stopped at zero, existence of a quasi-stationary distribution is studied. The scale function for these processes is introduced and the boundary is classified by a certain integrability condition on the scale function, which gives an extension of Feller's classification of the boundary for birth-and-death processes. The existence and the set of quasi-stationary distributions are characterized by the scale function and the new classification of the boundary.
In this paper, we study quasi-stationary distributions of nonlinearly perturbed semi-Markov processes in discrete time. This type of distributions is of interest for the analysis of stochastic systems which have finite lifetimes, but are expected to persist for a long time. We obtain asymptotic power series expansions for quasi-stationary distributions and it is shown how the coefficients in these expansions can be computed from a recursive algorithm. As an illustration of this algorithm, we present a numerical example for a discrete time Markov chain.
We study quasi-stationarity for one-dimensional diffusions killed at 0, when 0 is a regular boundary and $+\infty$ is an entrance boundary. We give a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of exactly one quasi-stationary distribution, and we also show that this distribution attracts all initial distributions.
We study a random process with reinforcement, which evolves following the dynamics of a given diffusion process in a bounded domain and is resampled according to its occupation measure when it reaches the boundary. We show that its occupation measure converges to the unique quasi-stationary distribution of the diffusion process absorbed at the boundary of the domain. Our proofs use recent results in the theory of quasi-stationary distributions and stochastic approximation techniques.
An algorithm for estimating quasi-stationary distribution of finite state space Markov chains has been proven in a previous paper. Now this paper proves a similar algorithm that works for general state space Markov chains under very general assumptions.
We consider a model of stationary population with random size given by a continuous state branching process with immigration with a quadratic branching mechanism. We give an exact elementary simulation procedure of the genealogical tree of $n$ individuals randomly chosen among the extant population at a given time. Then, we prove the convergence of the renormalized total length of this genealogical tree as $n$ goes to infinity, see also Pfaffelhuber, Wakolbinger and Weisshaupt (2011) in the context of a constant size population. The limit appears already in Bi and Delmas (2016) but with a diff…
In recent years there has been some focus on quasi-stationary behaviour of an one-dimensional Lévy process $X$, where we ask for the law $P(X_t\in dy | τ^-_0>t)$ for $t\to\infty$ and $τ_0^-=\inf\{t\geq 0: X_t<0\}$. In this paper we address the same question for so-called Parisian ruin time $τ^θ$, that happens when process stays below zero longer than independent exponential random variable with intensity $θ$.
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 establish the convergences (with respect to the simulation time $t$; the number of particles $N$; the timestep $γ$) of a Moran/Fleming-Viot type particle scheme toward the quasi-stationary distribution of a diffusion on the $d$-dimensional torus, killed at a smooth rate. In these conditions, quantitative bounds are obtained that, for each parameter ($t\rightarrow \infty$, $N\rightarrow \infty$ or $γ\rightarrow 0$) are independent from the two others.
In this paper we investigate quasi-stationary distributions μ_N of stochastic approximation algorithms with constant step size which can be viewed as random perturbations of a time-continuous dynamical system. Inspired by ecological models these processes have a closed absorbing set corresponding to extinction. Under some large deviation assumptions and the existence of an interior attractor for the ODE, we show that the weak* limit points of the QSD μ_N are invariant measures for the ODE with support in the interior attractors.
We establish convergence to the Kingman coalescent for the genealogy of a geographically - or otherwise - structured version of the Wright-Fisher population model with fast migration. The new feature is that migration probabilities may change in a random fashion. This brings a novel formula for the coalescent effective population size (EPS). We call it a quenched EPS to emphasize the key feature of our model - random environment. The quenched EPS is compared with an annealed (mean-field) EPS which describes the case of constant migration probabilities obtained by averaging the random migration…
For general, almost surely absorbed Markov processes, we obtain necessary and sufficient conditions for exponential convergence to a unique quasi-stationary distribution in the total variation norm. These conditions also ensure the existence and exponential ergodicity of the $Q$-process (the process conditioned to never be absorbed). We apply these results to one-dimensional birth and death processes with catastrophes, multi-dimensional birth and death processes, infinite-dimensional population models with Brownian mutations and neutron transport dynamics absorbed at the boundary of a bounded …
The Crump-Young model consists of two fully coupled stochastic processes modeling the substrate and microorganisms dynamics in a chemostat. Substrate evolves following an ordinary differential equation whose coefficients depend of microorganisms number. Microorganisms are modeled though a pure jump process whose the jump rates depend on the substrate concentration. It goes to extinction almost-surely in the sense that microorganism population vanishes. In this work, we show that, conditionally on the non-extinction, its distribution converges exponentially fast to a quasi-stationary distributi…
In the continuity of a recent paper ([6]), dealing with finite Markov chains, this paper proposes and analyzes a recursive algorithm for the approximation of the quasi-stationary distribution of a general Markov chain living on a compact metric space killed in finite time. The idea is to run the process until extinction and then to bring it back to life at a position randomly chosen according to the (possibly weighted) empirical occupation measure of its past positions. General conditions are given ensuring the convergence of this measure to the quasi-stationary distribution of the chain. We t…
Errors of approximations of the quasi-stationary distribution (the QSD) of the logistic SIS model are evaluated numerically. The results are used to derive asymptotic approximations of the approximation errors for large populations. We show in particular that there are two approximations above threshold for which the approximation errors are exponentially small. One of these approximations has been known for some time, while the other one is new. The result that the older one of these two approximations has an exponentially small approximation error is new.
We consider a Markov process $ X(t) $ on the nonnegative integers $E= S \cup \{0\}$, where $S=\{1,2,...\}$ is an irreducible class and 0 is an absorbing state. In this paper, we investigate conditions under which the quasi-stationary distribution for $X(t)$ exists and is unique, and any initial distribution supported in $S$ is in the domain of attraction of this quasi-stationary distribution. We further find five conditions which are equivalent to that the extinction time is uniformly bounded. As a consequence, we prove the van Doorn's conjecture in \cite{VD2012}. And we can greatly improve th…
In a first part, we prove a Lyapunov-type criterion for the $ξ\_1$-positive recurrence of absorbed birth and death processes and provide new results on the domain of attraction of the minimal quasi-stationary distribution. In a second part, we study the ergodicity and the convergence of a Fleming-Viot type particle system whose particles evolve independently as a birth and death process and jump on each others when they hit $0$. Our main result is that the sequence of empirical stationary distributions of the particle system converges to the minimal quasi-stationary distribution of the birth a…
We jointly investigate the existence of quasi-stationary distributions for one dimensional Lévy processes and the existence of traveling waves for the Fisher-Kolmogorov-Petrovskii-Piskunov (F-KPP) equation associated with the same motion. Using probabilistic ideas developed by S. Harris, we show that the existence of a traveling wave for the F-KPP equation associated with a centered Lévy processes that branches at rate $r$ and travels at velocity $c$ is equivalent to the existence of a quasi-stationary distribution for a Lévy process with the same movement but drifted by $-c$ and killed at zer…
On the uniqueness of quasi-stationary distributions for population models with spatial structure
University of Buenos Aires（布宜诺斯艾利斯大学）；Instituto de Investigaciones Matemáticas Luis A. Santaló（路易斯·A·桑塔洛数学研究所）；University of São Paulo（圣保罗大学）；Federal University of Minas Gerais（米纳斯吉拉斯联邦大学）
This note presents conjectures on polynomial/algebraic/sub-exponential convergence of transition probabilities for $λ$-null recurrent and $λ$-transient Markov chains in continuous time. The only known positive examples are in queueing, branching, and related models. Implications for the existence of limiting conditional distributions for $λ$-transient chains are discussed.
We are interested in the long-time behavior of a diploid population with sexual reproduction, characterized by its genotype composition at one bi-allelic locus. The population is modeled by a 3-dimensional birth-and-death process with competition, cooperation and Mendelian reproduction. This stochastic process is indexed by a scaling parameter $K$ that goes to infinity, following a large population assumption. When the birth and natural death parameters are of order $K$, the sequence of stochastic processes indexed by $K$ converges toward a slow-fast dynamics. We indeed prove the convergence t…
This work is concerned with the analysis of a stochastic approximation algorithm for the simulation of quasi-stationary distributions on finite state spaces. This is a generalization of a method introduced by Aldous, Flannery and Palacios. It is shown that the asymptotic behavior of the empirical occupation measure of this process is precisely related to the asymptotic behavior of some deterministic dynamical system induced by a vector field on the unit simplex. This approach provides new proof of convergence as well as precise rates for this type of algorithm. We then compare this algorithm w…
This article studies the quasi-stationary behaviour of multidimensional birth and death processes, modeling the interaction between several species, absorbed when one of the coordinates hits 0. We study models where the absorption rate is not uniformly bounded, contrary to most of the previous works. To handle this natural situation, we develop original Lyapunov function arguments that might apply in other situations with unbounded killing rates. We obtain the exponential convergence in total variation of the conditional distributions to a unique stationary distribution, uniformly with respect…
Motivated by sample path decomposition of the stationary continuous state branching process with immigration, a general population model is considered using the idea of immortal individual. We compute the joint distribution of the random variables: the time to the most recent common ancestor (MRCA), the size of the current population and the size of the population just before MRCA. We obtain the bottleneck effect as well. The distribution of the number of the oldest families is also established.
This article studies the quasi-stationary behaviour of absorbed one-dimensional diffusion processes with killing on $[0,\infty)$. We obtain criteria for the exponential convergence to a unique quasi-stationary distribution in total variation, uniformly with respect to the initial distribution. Our approach is based on probabilistic and coupling methods, contrary to the classical approach based on spectral theory results. Our general criteria apply in the case where $\infty$ is entrance and 0 either regular or exit, and are proved to be satisfied under several explicit assumptions expressed onl…
In this paper, we study quasi-stationary distributions (QSDs) for one-dimensional diffusions killed at 0, when 0 is a regular boundary and $+\infty$ is a natural boundary. More precisely, we not only give a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a QSD, but we also construct all QSDs for one-dimensional diffusions. Moreover, we give a sufficient condition for $R$-positivity of the process killed at the origin. This condition is only based on the drift, which is easy to check.
Consider the Langevin process, described by a vector (positions and momenta) in $\mathbb{R}^{d}\times\mathbb{R}^d$. Let $\mathcal O$ be a $\mathcal{C}^2$ open bounded and connected set of $\mathbb{R}^d$. Recent works showed the existence of a unique quasi-stationary distribution (QSD) of the Langevin process on the domain $D:=\mathcal{O}\times\mathbb{R}^d$. In this article, we study the overdamped limit of this QSD, i.e. when the friction coefficient goes to infinity. In particular, we show that the marginal law in position of the overdamped limit is the QSD of the overdamped Langevin process …
We study the probabilistic evolution of a birth and death continuous time measure-valued process with mutations and ecological interactions. The individuals are characterized by (phenotypic) traits that take values in a compact metric space. Each individual can die or generate a new individual. The birth and death rates may depend on the environment through the action of the whole population. The offspring can have the same trait or can mutate to a randomly distributed trait. We assume that the population will be extinct almost surely. Our goal is the study, in this infinite dimensional framew…
This survey concerns the study of quasi-stationary distributions with a specific focus on models derived from ecology and population dynamics. We are concerned with the long time behavior of different stochastic population size processes when 0 is an absorbing point almost surely attained by the process. The hitting time of this point, namely the extinction time, can be large compared to the physical time and the population size can fluctuate for large amount of time before extinction actually occurs. This phenomenon can be understood by the study of quasi-limiting distributions. In this paper…
This paper studies a method, which has been proposed in the Physics literature by [8, 7, 10], for estimating the quasi-stationary distribution. In contrast to existing methods in eigenvector estimation, the method eliminates the need for explicit transition matrix manipulation to extract the principal eigenvector. Our paper analyzes the algorithm by casting it as a stochastic approximation algorithm (Robbins-Monro) [23, 16]. In doing so, we prove its convergence and obtain its rate of convergence. Based on this insight, we also give an example where the rate of convergence is very slow. This p…
We consider general Markov processes with absorption and provide criteria ensuring the exponential convergence in total variation of the distribution of the process conditioned not to be absorbed. The first one is based on two-sided estimates on the transition kernel of the process and the second one on gradient estimates on its semigroup. We apply these criteria to multi-dimensional diffusion processes in bounded domains of $R^d$ or in compact Riemannian manifolds with boundary, with absorption at the boundary.
The paper contains the complete analysis of the Galton-Watson models with immigration, including the processes in the random environment, stationary or non-stationary ones. We also study the branching random walk on $Z^d$ with immigration and prove the existence of the limits for the first two correlation functions.
In this paper we analyze the quasi-stationary workload of a Lévy-driven storage system. More precisely, assuming the system is in stationarity, we study its behavior conditional on the event that the busy period $T$ in which time 0 is contained has not ended before time $t$, as $t\to\infty$. We do so by first identifying the double Laplace transform associated with the workloads at time 0 and time $t$, on the event $\{T>t\}.$ This transform can be explicitly computed for the case of spectrally one-sided jumps. Then asymptotic techniques for Laplace inversion are relied upon to find the corresp…
We describe the processes obtained by time reversal of a class of stationary jump-diffusion processes that model the dynamics of genetic variation in populations subject to repeated bottlenecks. Assuming that only one lineage survives each bottleneck, the forward process is a diffusion on [0,1] that jumps to the boundary before diffusing back into the interior. We show that the behavior of the time-reversed process depends on whether the boundaries are accessible to the diffusive motion of the forward process. If a boundary point is inaccessible to the forward diffusion, then time reversal lea…
We consider the discrete-time voter model on complete bipartite graphs and study the quasi-stationary distribution (QSD) for the model as the size of one of the partitions tends to infinity while the other partition remains fixed. We show that the QSDs converge weakly to a nontrivial limit which features a consensus with the exception of a random number of dissenting vertices in the "large" partition. Moreover, we explicitly calculate the law of the number of dissenters and show that it follows the heavy-tailed Sibuya distribution with parameter depending on the size of the "small" partition. …
Quasi-stationary distributions (QSD) have been widely studied since the pioneering work of Kolmogorov (1938), Yaglom (1947) and Sevastyanov (1951). They appear as a natural object when considering Markov processes that are certainly absorbed since they are invariant for the evolution of the distribution of the process conditioned on not being absorbed. They hence appropriately describe the state of the process at large times for non absorbed paths. Unlike invariant distributions for Markov processes, QSD are solutions of a non-linear equation and there can be 0, 1 or an infinity of them. Also,…
The stationary asymptotic properties of the diffusion limit of a multi-type branching process with neutral mutations are studied. For the critical and subcritical processes the interesting limits are those of quasi-stationary distributions conditioned on non-extinction. Pedagogical derivations are given for known results that the limiting distributions for supercritical and critical processes are found to collapse onto rays aligned with stationary eigenvectors of the mutation rate matrix, in agreement with discrete multi-type branching processes. For the sub-critical process the previously uns…
