arXiv subjects

Nathanael Berestycki

Publications and source records attributed to Nathanael Berestycki.

23 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2010

Global divergence of spatial coalescents

We study several fundamental properties of a class of stochastic processes called spatial Lambda-coalescents. In these models, a number of particles perform independent random walks on some underlying graph G. In addition, particles on the same vertex merge randomly according to a given coalescing mechanism. A remarkable property of mean-field coalescent processes is that they may come down from infinity, meaning that, starting with an infinite number of particles, only a finite number remains after any positive amount of time, almost surely. We show here however that, in the spatial setting, on any infinite and bounded-degree graph, the total number of particles will always remain infinite at all times, almost surely. Moreover, if G=Z^d, and the coalescing mechanism is Kingman's coalescent, then starting with N particles at the origin, the total number of particles remaining is of order (log* N)^d at any fixed positive time (where log* is the inverse tower function). At sufficiently large times the total number of particles is of order (log* N)^{d-2}, when d>2. We provide parallel results in the recurrent case d=2. The spatial Beta-coalescents behave similarly, where log log N is replacing log* N.

math.PR↗

arXiv2009

Recent progress in coalescent theory

Coalescent theory is the study of random processes where particles may join each other to form clusters as time evolves. These notes provide an introduction to some aspects of the mathematics of coalescent processes and their applications to theoretical population genetics and other fields such as spin glass models. The emphasis is on recent work concerning in particular the connection of these processes to continuum random trees and spatial models such as coalescing random walks.

math.PR↗

arXiv2006

Gibbs distributions for random partitions generated by a fragmentation process

In this paper we study random partitions of 1,...n, where every cluster of size j can be in any of w\_j possible internal states. The Gibbs (n,k,w) distribution is obtained by sampling uniformly among such partitions with k clusters. We provide conditions on the weight sequence w allowing construction of a partition valued random process where at step k the state has the Gibbs (n,k,w) distribution, so the partition is subject to irreversible fragmentation as time evolves. For a particular one-parameter family of weight sequences w\_j, the time-reversed process is the discrete Marcus-Lushnikov coalescent process with affine collision rate K\_{i,j}=a+b(i+j) for some real numbers a and b. Under further restrictions on a and b, the fragmentation process can be realized by conditioning a Galton-Watson tree with suitable offspring distribution to have n nodes, and cutting the edges of this tree by random sampling of edges without replacement, to partition the tree into a collection of subtrees. Suitable offspring distributions include the binomial, negative binomial and Poisson distributions.

math.PR↗

arXiv2006

Limiting behavior of the distance of a random walk

This investigation is motivated by a result we proved recently for the random transposition random walk: the distance from the starting point of the walk has a phase transition from a linear regime to a sublinear regime at time $n/2$. Here, we study three new examples. It is trivial that the distance for random walk on the hypercube is smooth and is given by one simple formula. In the case of random adjacent transpositions, we find that there is no phase transition even though the distance has different scalings in three different regimes. In the case of a random 3-regular graph, there is a phase transition from linear growth to a constant equal to the diameter of the graph, at time $3\log_2 n$.

math.PR↗

arXiv2004

A phase transition in the random transposition random walk

Our work is motivated by Bourque and Pevzner's (2002) simulation study of the effectiveness of the parsimony method in studying genome rearrangement, and leads to a surprising result about the random transposition walk on the group of permutations on $n$ elements. Consider this walk in continuous time starting at the identity and let $D_t$ be the minimum number of transpositions needed to go back to the identity from the location at time $t$. $D_t$ undergoes a phase transition: the distance $D_{cn/2} \sim u(c)n$, where $u$ is an explicit function satisfying $u(c)=c/2$ for $c \le 1$ and $u(c)1$. In other words, the distance to the identity is roughly linear during the subcritical phase, and after critical time $n/2$ it becomes sublinear. In addition, we describe the fluctuations of $D_{cn/2}$ about its mean in each of the threeregimes (subcritical, critical and supercritical). The techniques used involve viewing the cycles in the random permutation as a coagulation-fragmentation process and relating the behavior to the \Erdős-Renyi random graph model.

math.PR↗