The stationary and quasi-stationary properties of neutral multi-type branching process diffusions

Abstract

The stationary asymptotic properties of the diffusion limit of a multi-type branching process with neutral mutations are studied. For the critical and subcritical processes the interesting limits are those of quasi-stationary distributions conditioned on non-extinction. Pedagogical derivations are given for known results that the limiting distributions for supercritical and critical processes are found to collapse onto rays aligned with stationary eigenvectors of the mutation rate matrix, in agreement with discrete multi-type branching processes. For the sub-critical process the previously unsolved quasi-stationary distribution is obtained to first order in the overall mutation rate, which is assumed to be small. The sampling distribution over allele types for a sample of given finite size is found to agree to first order in mutation rates with the analogous sampling distribution for a Wright-Fisher diffusion with constant population size.