La Trobe Statistics and Stochastic Colloquium: Lambda Coalescent Trees and Graphs

Event: La Trobe Statistics and Stochastic Colloquium
Speaker: Professor Robert Griffiths (Monash University)
Title: Lambda Coalescent Trees and Graphs
Date: 11:00–12:30, Thursday 30 April 2020
Zoom: https://latrobe.zoom.us/j/98135773372
PDF slides: unavailable

Abstract: The Lambda coalescent introduced by Pitman (1999) and Sagitov (1999) is a random tree which has multiple mergers. It is a dual to a Lambda-Fleming–Viot process which describes a population of individuals with births and deaths, where a single individual’s children can contribute a large proportion of the population. The population process has jumps at times where individuals give birth. The Wright–Fisher diffusion in contrast, being  a diffusion, is continuous over time. The Kingman coalescent, a random binary tree,  is dual to the Wright–Fisher diffusion. This talk will describe Lambda coalescent trees, how they relate to a population of individuals, and a connection with the Wright–Fisher diffusion.