Markovian tricks for non-Markovian trees: contour process, extinction and scaling limits

Abstract

In this work, we study a family of non-Markovian trees modeling populations where individuals live and reproduce independently with possibly time-dependent birth-rate and lifetime distribution. To this end, we use the coding process introduced by Lambert. We show that, in our situation, this process is no longer a L{\'e}vy process but remains a Feller process and we give a complete characterization of its generator. This allows us to study the model through well-known Markov processes techniques. On one hand, introducing a scale function for such processes allows us to get necessary and sufficient conditions for extinction or non-extinction and to characterize the law of such trees conditioned on these events. On the other hand, using Lyapounov drift techniques , we get another set of, easily checkable, sufficient criteria for extinction or non-extinction and some tail estimates for the tree length. Finally, we also study scaling limits of such random trees and observe that the Bessel tree appears naturally.