Mass-structure of weighted real trees

Abstract

Rooted, weighted continuum random trees are used to describe limits of sequences of random discrete trees. Formally, they are random quadruples $(\mathcal{T},d,r,p)$, where $(\mathcal{T},d)$ is a tree-like metric space, $r\in\mathcal{T}$ is a distinguished root, and $p$ is a probability measure on this space. The underlying branching structure is carried implicitly in the metric $d$. We explore various ways of describing the interaction between branching structure and mass in $(\mathcal{T},d,r,p)$ in a way that depends on $d$ only by way of this branching structure. We introduce a notion of mass-structure equivalence and show that two rooted, weighted $\mathbb{R}$-trees are equivalent in this sense if and only if the discrete hierarchies derived by i.i.d. sampling from their weights, in a manner analogous to Kingman's paintbox, have the same distribution. We introduce a family of trees, called "interval partition trees" that serve as representatives of mass-structure equivalence classes, and which naturally represent the laws of the aforementioned hierarchies.