The distance profile of rooted and unrooted simply generated trees

It is well known that the height profile of a critical conditioned Galton–Watson tree with finite offspring variance converges, after a suitable normalisation, to the local time of a standard Brownian excursion. In this work, we study the distance profile, defined as the profile of all distances between pairs of vertices. We show that after a proper rescaling the distance profile converges to a continuous random function that can be described as the density of distances between random points in the Brownian continuum random tree. We show that this limiting function a.s. is Hölder continuous of any order $\alpha<1$ , and that it is a.e. differentiable. We note that it cannot be differentiable at 0, but leave as open questions whether it is Lipschitz, and whether it is continuously differentiable on the half-line $(0,\infty)$ . The distance profile is naturally defined also for unrooted trees contrary to the height profile that is designed for rooted trees. This is used in our proof, and we prove the corresponding convergence result for the distance profile of random unrooted simply generated trees. As a minor purpose of the present work, we also formalize the notion of unrooted simply generated trees and include some simple results relating them to rooted simply generated trees, which might be of independent interest.

Tree limits and limits of random trees

We explore the tree limits recently defined by Elek and Tardos. In particular, we find tree limits for many classes of random trees. We give general theorems for three classes of conditional Galton–Watson trees and simply generated trees, for split trees and generalized split trees (as defined here), and for trees defined by a continuous-time branching process. These general results include, for example, random labelled trees, ordered trees, random recursive trees, preferential attachment trees, and binary search trees.

Protection numbers in simply generated trees and Pólya trees

We determine the limit of the expected value and the variance of the protection number of the root in simply generated trees, in P?lya trees, and in unlabelled non-plane binary trees, when the number of vertices tends to infinity. Moreover, we compute expectation and variance of the protection number of a randomly chosen vertex in all those tree classes. We obtain exact formulas as sum representations, where the obtained sums are rapidly converging thus allowing an efficient numerical computation of high accuracy.

Simply Generated Non-Crossing Partitions

We introduce and study the model of simply generated non-crossing partitions, which are, roughly speaking, chosen at random according to a sequence of weights. This framework encompasses the particular case of uniform non-crossing partitions with constraints on their block sizes. Our main tool is a bijection between non-crossing partitions and plane trees, which maps such simply generated non-crossing partitions into simply generated trees so that blocks of sizekare in correspondence with vertices of out-degreek. This allows us to obtain limit theorems concerning the block structure of simply generated non-crossing partitions. We apply our results in free probability by giving a simple formula relating the maximum of the support of a compactly supported probability measure on the real line in terms of its free cumulants.

Asymptotics of Symmetric Compound Poisson Population Models

Compound Poisson population models are particular conditional branching process models. A formula for the transition probabilities of the backward process for general compound Poisson models is verified. Symmetric compound Poisson models are defined in terms of a parameter θ ∈ (0, ∞) and a power series φ with positive radius r of convergence. It is shown that the asymptotic behaviour of symmetric compound Poisson models is mainly determined by the characteristic value θrφ′(r−). If θrφ′(r−)≥1, then the model is in the domain of attraction of the Kingman coalescent. If θrφ′(r−) < 1, then under mild regularity conditions a condensation phenomenon occurs which forces the model to be in the domain of attraction of a discrete-time Dirac coalescent. The proofs are partly based on the analytic saddle point method. They draw heavily from local limit theorems and from results of S. Janson on simply generated trees, conditioned Galton-Watson trees, random allocations and condensation. Several examples of compound Poisson models are provided and analysed.

Simply generated trees, conditioned Galton―Watson trees, random allocations and condensation: Extended abstract

International audience We give a unified treatment of the limit, as the size tends to infinity, of random simply generated trees, including both the well-known result in the standard case of critical Galton-Watson trees and similar but less well-known results in the other cases (i.e., when no equivalent critical Galton-Watson tree exists). There is a well-defined limit in the form of an infinite random tree in all cases; for critical Galton-Watson trees this tree is locally finite but for the other cases the random limit has exactly one node of infinite degree. The random infinite limit tree can in all cases be constructed by a modified Galton-Watson process. In the standard case of a critical Galton-Watson tree, the limit tree has an infinite "spine", where the offspring distribution is size-biased. In the other cases, the spine has finite length and ends with a vertex with infinite degree. A node of infinite degree in the limit corresponds to the existence of one node with very high degree in the finite random trees; in physics terminology, this is a type of condensation. In simple cases, there is one node with a degree that is roughly a constant times the number of nodes, while all other degrees are much smaller; however, more complicated behaviour is also possible. The proofs use a well-known connection to a random allocation model that we call balls-in-boxes, and we prove corresponding results for this model.

On the number of transversals in random trees

International audience We study transversals in random trees with n vertices asymptotically as n tends to infinity. Our investigation treats the average number of transversals of fixed size, the size of a random transversal as well as the probability that a random subset of the vertex set of a tree is a transversal for the class of simply generated trees and for Pólya trees. The last parameter was already studied by Devroye for simply generated trees. We offer an alternative proof based on generating functions and singularity analysis and extend the result to Pólya trees.

The profile of unlabeled trees

International audience We consider the number of nodes in the levels of unlabeled rooted random trees and show that the joint distribution of several level sizes (where the level number is scaled by $\sqrt{n}$) weakly converges to the distribution of the local time of a Brownian excursion evaluated at the times corresponding to the level numbers. This extends existing results for simply generated trees and forests to the case of unlabeled rooted trees.