Compact metric measure spaces and Lambda-coalescents coming down from infinity

TL;DR

This paper investigates the topological properties of metric spaces generated by Lambda-coalescents, establishing conditions under which these spaces are compact or not, based on whether the coalescent comes down from infinity.

Contribution

It characterizes the compactness of measure trees from Lambda-coalescents and links this to the coalescent's behavior of coming down from infinity, using Gromov-weak topology.

Findings

Lambda-coalescent measure trees are compact iff the coalescent comes down from infinity

If the coalescent stays infinite, the metric space is not locally compact

Provides characterizations of (local) compactness for random metric measure spaces

Abstract

We study topological properties of random metric spaces which arise by Lambda-coalescents. These are stochastic processes, which start with an infinite number of lines and evolve through multiple mergers in an exchangeable setting. We show that the resulting Lambda-coalescent measure tree is compact iff the Lambda-coalescent comes down from infinity, i.e. only consists of finitely many lines at any positive time. If the Lambda-coalescent stays infinite, the resulting metric measure space is not even locally compact. Our results are based on general notions of compact and locally compact (isometry classes of) metric measure spaces. In particular, we give characterizations for general (random) metric measure spaces to be (locally) compact using the Gromov-weak topology.