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The general coalescent with asynchronous mergers of ancestral lines

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 July 2016

Serik Sagitov*
Affiliation:
Chalmers University of Technology and Göteborg University
*
Postal address: Department of Mathematics, Chalmers University of Technology, S-412 96 Göteborg, Sweden. Email address: [email protected].

Abstract

Take a sample of individuals in the fixed-size population model with exchangeable family sizes. Follow the ancestral lines for the sampled individuals backwards in time to observe the ancestral process. We describe a class of asymptotic structures for the ancestral process via a convergence criterion. One of the basic conditions of the criterion prevents simultaneous mergers of ancestral lines. Another key condition implies that the marginal distribution of the family size is attracted by an infinitely divisible distribution. If the latter is normal the coalescent allows only for pairwise mergers (Kingman's coalescent). Otherwise multiple mergers happen with positive probability.

MSC classification

Type
Research Papers
Copyright
Copyright © Applied Probability Trust 1999 

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Footnotes

This work is part of the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation project ‘Dependence and Interaction in Stochastic Population Dynamics’.

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