An approximation of populations on a habitat with large carrying capacity

The simple Galton--Watson process describes populations where individuals live one season and are then replaced by a random number of children. It can also be viewed as a way of generating random trees, each vertex being an individual of the family tree. This viewpoint has led to new insights and a revival of classical theory. We show how a similar reinterpretation can shed new light on the more interesting forms of branching processes that allow repeated bearings and, thus, ...

A curious connection exists between the theory of optimal stopping for independent random variables, and branching processes. In particular, for the branching process $Z_n$ with offspring distribution $Y$, there exists a random variable $X$ such that the probability $P(Z_n=0)$ of extinction of the $n$th generation in the branching process equals the value obtained by optimally stopping the sequence $X_1,...,X_n$, where these variables are i.i.d distributed as $X$. Generalizat...

This work is devoted to the study of a stochastic logistic growth model with and without the Allee effect. Such a model describes the evolution of a population under environmental stochastic fluctuations and is in the form of a stochastic differential equation driven by multiplicative Gaussian noise. With the help of the associated Fokker-Planck equation, we analyze the population extinction probability and the probability of reaching a large population size before reaching a...

The paper considers the well-known Galton-Watson stochastic branching process. We are dealing with a non-critical case. In the subcritical case, when the mean of the direct descendants of one particle per generation of the time step is less than 1, the population mean of the number of particles on the positive trajectories of the process stabilizes and approaches 1/K, where K is the so-called Kolmogorov constant. The paper is devoted to the search for an explicit expression o...

The site frequency spectrum (SFS) is a widely used summary statistic of genomic data, offering a simple means of inferring the evolutionary history of a population. Motivated by recent evidence for the role of neutral evolution in cancer, we examine the SFS of neutral mutations in an exponentially growing population. Whereas recent work has focused on the mean behavior of the SFS in this scenario, here, we investigate the first-order asymptotics of the underlying stochastic p...

A population genetics model based on a multitype branching process, or equivalently a Galton-Watson branching process for multiple alleles, is pre- sented. The diffusion limit forward Kolmogorov equation is derived for the case of neutral mutations. The asymptotic stationary solution is obtained and has the property that the extant population partitions into subpopulations whose relative sizes are determined by mutation rates. An approximate time-dependent solution is obtaine...

We consider several one-species population dynamics model with finite and infinite carrying capacity, time dependent growth and effort rates and solve them analytically. We show that defining suitable scaling functions for a given time, one is able to demonstrate that their ratio with respect to its initial value is universal. This ratio is independent from the initial condition and from the model parameters. Although the effort rate does not break the model universality it p...

The theory of finite-size scaling explains how the singular behavior of thermodynamic quantities in the critical point of a phase transition emerges when the size of the system becomes infinite. Usually, this theory is presented in a phenomenological way. Here, we exactly demonstrate the existence of a finite-size scaling law for the Galton-Watson branching processes when the number of offsprings of each individual follows either a geometric distribution or a generalized geom...

In this work we construct individual-based models that give rise to the generalized logistic model at the mean-field deterministic level and that allow us to interpret the parameters of these models in terms of individual interactions. We also study the effect of internal fluctuations on the long-time dynamics for the different models that have been widely used in the literature, such as the theta-logistic and Savageau models. In particular, we determine the conditions for po...

We study the exploration (or height) process of a continuous time non-binary Galton-Watson random tree, in the subcritical, critical and supercritical cases. Thus we consider the branching process in continuous time (Z_{t})_{t\geq 0}, which describes the number of offspring alive at time t. We then renormalize our branching process and exploration process, and take the weak limit as the size of the population tends to infinity. Finally we deduce a Ray-Knight representation.