Limits of multiplicative inhomogeneous random graphs and L\'evy trees: Limit theorems

Abstract

We consider a natural model of inhomogeneous random graphs that extends the classical Erd\H os-R\'enyi graphs and shares a close connection with the multiplicative coalescence, as pointed out by Aldous [AOP 1997]. In this model, the vertices are assigned weights that govern their tendency to form edges. It is by looking at the asymptotic distributions of the masses (sum of the weights) of the connected components of these graphs that Aldous and Limic [EJP 1998] have identified the entrance boundary of the multiplicative coalescence, which is intimately related to the excursion lengths of certain L\'evy-type processes. We, instead, look at the metric structure of these components and prove their Gromov-Hausdorff-Prokhorov convergence to a class of random compact measured metric spaces that have been introduced in a companion paper. Our asymptotic regimes relate directly to the general convergence condition appearing in the work of Aldous and Limic. Our techniques provide a unified approach for this general "critical" regime, and relies upon two key ingredients: an encoding of the graph by some L\'evy process as well as an embedding of its connected components into Galton-Watson forests. This embedding transfers asymptotically into an embedding of the limit objects into a forest of L\'evy trees, which allows us to give an explicit construction of the limit objects from the excursions of the L\'evy-type process. The mains results combined with the ones in the other paper allow us to extend and complement several previous results that had been obtained via regime-specific proofs, for instance: the case of Erd\H os-R\'enyi random graphs obtained by Addario-Berry, Goldschmidt and B. [PTRF 2012], the asymptotic homogeneous case as studied by Bhamidi, Sen and Wang [PTRF 2017], or the power-law case as considered by Bhamidi, Sen and van der Hofstad [PTRF 2018].