Invariance principles for spatial multitype Galton-Watson trees

Let T be a rooted supercritical multi-type Galton-Watson (MGW) tree with types coming from a finite alphabet, conditioned to non-extinction. The lambda-biased random walk (X_t, t>=0) on T is the nearest-neighbor random walk which, when at a vertex v with d(v) offspring, moves closer to the root with probability lambda/[lambda+d(v)], and to each of the offspring with probability 1/[lambda+d(v)]. This walk is recurrent for lambda>=rho and transient for 0<lambda<rho, with rho th...

We investigate the genealogical structure of general critical or subcritical continuous-state branching processes. Analogously to the coding of a discrete tree by its contour function, this genealogical structure is coded by a real-valued stochastic process called the height process, which is itself constructed as a local time functional of a Levy process with no negative jumps. We present a detailed study of the height process and of an associated measure-valued process call...

We discuss several connections between discrete and continuous random trees. In the discrete setting, we focus on Galton-Watson trees under various conditionings. In particular, we present a simple approach to Aldous' theorem giving the convergence in distribution of the contour process of conditioned Galton-Watson trees towards the normalized Brownian excursion. We also briefly discuss applications to combinatorial trees. In the continuous setting, we use the formalism of re...

Consider a branching Markov process with values in some general type space. Conditional on survival up to generation $N$, the genealogy of the extant population defines a random marked metric measure space, where individuals are marked by their type and pairwise distances are measured by the time to the most recent common ancestor. In the present manuscript, we devise a general method of moments to prove convergence of such genealogies in the Gromov-weak topology when $N \to ...

We introduce a certain class of 2-type Galton-Watson trees with edge lengths. We prove that, after an adequate rescaling, the weighted height function of a forest of such trees converges in law to the reflected Brownian motion. We then use this to deduce under mild conditions an invariance principle for multitype Galton--Watson trees with a countable number of types, thus extending a result of G. Miermont on multitype Galton--Watson trees with finitely many types.

We give a necessary and sufficient condition for the convergence in distribution of a conditioned Galton-Watson tree to Kesten's tree. This yields elementary proofs of Kesten's result as well as other known results on local limit of conditioned Galton-Watson trees. We then apply this condition to get new results, in the critical and sub-critical cases, on the limit in distribution of a Galton-Watson tree conditioned on having a large number of individuals with out-degree in a...

We provide a simple forest model to encode the genealogical structure of a multitype Galton-Watson process with immigration. We provide two encodings of these forests by stochastic processes. We show, under appropriate conditions, the depth-first encodings of each particular type converge to a solution to a system of stochastic integral equations involving height processes perturbed by functionals of their local times. The forest picture allows us to extend the Ray-Knight the...

We consider the asymptotics of various estimators based on a large sample of branching trees from a critical multi-type Galton-Watson process, as the sample size increases to infinity. The asymptotics of additive functions of trees, such as sizes of trees and frequencies of types within trees, a higher-order asymptotic of the ``relative frequency'' estimator of the left eigenvector of the mean matrix, a higher-order joint asymptotic of the maximum likelihood estimators of the...

We introduce and study a model of plane random trees generalizing the famous Bienaym\'e--Galton--Watson model but where births and deaths are locally correlated. More precisely, given a random variable $(B,H)$ with values in $\{1,2,3, \dots\}^2$, given the state of the tree at some generation, the next generation is obtained (informally) by successively deleting $B$ individuals side-by-side and replacing them with $H$ new particles where the samplings are i.i.d. We prove that...

We show that large critical multi-type Galton-Watson trees, when conditioned to be large, converge locally in distribution to an infinite tree which is analoguous to Kesten's infinite monotype Galton-Watson tree. This is proven when we condition on the number of vertices of one fixed types, and with an extra technical assumption if we count at least two types. We then apply these results to study local limits of random planar maps, showing that large critical Boltzmann-distri...