arXiv subjects

Airam Blancas

Publications and source records attributed to Airam Blancas.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Fixation and stationary times for the $Λ$-Wright-Fisher process

We study the fixation and stationary behavior of the Lambda-Wright-Fisher process with parent-independent mutation and finitely many types, a jump-diffusion model for allele frequency dynamics in large populations with potentially large offspring variance. Using a lookdown construction, we characterize the distribution of fixation times and the order of allele extinctions in the absence of mutations, and identify a strong stationary time in the presence of mutations. Our results include explicit expressions for the mean fixation and stationary times for the Wright-Fisher diffusion, and mean fixation times in the Beta-coalescent case. A key component of our approach is the analysis of the fixation line introduced by Hénard in (Ann. Appl. Probab., 25:3007-3032, 2015). We extend this process to incorporate mutation, providing a unified framework for studying both fixation and equilibrium behavior.

math.PR↗

arXiv2025

Allele trees for the mother-dependent neutral mutations model and their scaling limits in the rare mutations regime

The mother-dependent neutral mutations model describes the evolution of a population across discrete generations, where neutral mutations occur among a finite set of possible alleles. In this model, each mutant child acquires a type different from that of its mother, chosen uniformly at random. In this work, we define a multitype allele tree associated with this model and analyze its scaling limit through a Markov chain that tracks the sizes of allelic subfamilies and their mutant descendants. We show that this Markov chain converges to a continuous-state Markov process, whose transition probabilities depend on the sizes of the initial allelic populations and those of their mutant offspring in the first allelic generation. As a result, the allele tree converges to a multidimensional limiting object, which can be described in terms of the universal allele tree introduced by Bertoin (2010).

math.PR↗

arXiv2025

Crossing bridges between percolation models and Bienaymé-Galton-Watson trees

In this survey, we explore the connections between two areas of probability: percolation theory and population genetic models. Our first goal is to highlight a construction on Galton-Watson trees, which has been described in two different ways: Bernoulli bond percolation and neutral mutations. Next, we introduce a novel connection between the Divide-and-Color percolation model and a particular multi-type Galton-Watson tree. We provide a gentle introduction to these topics while presenting an overview of the results that connect them.

math.PR↗

arXiv2024

Coalescent point process of branching trees in varying environment

Consider an arbitrary large population at the present time, originated at an unspecified arbitrary large time in the past, where individuals in the same generation reproduce independently, forward in time, with the same offspring distribution but potentially changing among generations. In other words, the reproduction is driven by a Galton-Watson process in a varying environment. The genealogy of the current generation backwards in time is uniquely determined by the coalescent point process $(A_i, i\geq 1)$, where $A_i$ is the coalescent time between individuals $i$ and $i+1$. In general, this process is not Markov. In constant environment, Lambert and Popovic (2013) proposed a Markov process of point measures to reconstruct the coalescent point process. We present a counterexample where we show that their process does not have the Markov property. The main contribution of this work is to propose a vector valued Markov process $(B_i,i\geq 1)$, that reach the goal to reconstruct the genealogy, with finite information for every $i$. Additionally, when the offspring distributions are lineal fractional, we show that the variables $(A_i, i\geq 1)$ are independent and identically distributed.

math.PR↗

arXiv2022

Evolving genealogies for branching populations under selection and competition

For a continuous state branching process with two types of individuals which are subject to selection and density dependent competition, we characterize the joint evolution of population size, type configurations and genealogies as the unique strong solution of a system of SDE's. Our construction is achieved in the lookdown framework and provides a synthesis as well as a generalization of cases considered separately in two seminal papers by Donnelly and Kurtz (1999), namely fluctuating population sizes under neutrality, and selection with constant population size. As a conceptual core in our approach we introduce the selective lookdown space which is obtained from its neutral counterpart through a state-dependent thinning of ``potential'' selection/competition events whose rates interact with the evolution of the type densities. The updates of the genealogical distance matrix at the ``active'' selection/competition events are obtained through an appropriate sampling from the selective lookdown space. The solution of the above mentioned system of SDE's is then mapped into the joint evolution of population size and symmetrized type configurations and genealogies, i.e. marked distance matrix distributions. By means of Kurtz' Markov mapping theorem, we characterize the latter process as the unique solution of a martingale problem. For the sake of transparency we restrict the main part of our presentation to a prototypical example with two types, which contains the essential features. In the final section we outline an extension to processes with multiple types including mutation.

math.PR↗

arXiv2018

Trees within trees: Simple nested coalescents

We consider the compact space of pairs of nested partitions of $\mathbb N$, where by analogy with models used in molecular evolution, we call "gene partition" the finer partition and "species partition" the coarser one. We introduce the class of nondecreasing processes valued in nested partitions, assumed Markovian and with exchangeable semigroup. These processes are said simple when each partition only undergoes one coalescence event at a time (but possibly the same time). Simple nested exchangeable coalescent (SNEC) processes can be seen as the extension of $Λ$-coalescents to nested partitions. We characterize the law of SNEC processes as follows. In the absence of gene coalescences, species blocks undergo $Λ$-coalescent type events and in the absence of species coalescences, gene blocks lying in the same species block undergo i.i.d. $Λ$-coalescents. Simultaneous coalescence of the gene and species partitions are governed by an intensity measure $ν_s$ on $(0,1]\times {\mathcal M}_1 ([0,1])$ providing the frequency of species merging and the law in which are drawn (independently) the frequencies of genes merging in each coalescing species block. As an application, we also study the conditions under which a SNEC process comes down from infinity.

math.PR↗