A branching diffusion model of selection: from the neutral Wright-Fisher case to the one including mutations

TL;DR

This paper models selection in population genetics using a branching diffusion process derived from Wright-Fisher models, analyzing extinction probabilities and effects of mutations and selection through Doob-transform techniques.

Contribution

It introduces a novel branching diffusion framework for Wright-Fisher processes incorporating selection and mutations via Doob-transform methods.

Findings

In neutral case, extinction occurs with exponential tail decay.

With mutations, extinction occurs with power-law tail decay.

The model captures the trade-off between branching and boundary absorption or reflection.

Abstract

We consider diffusion processes x_{t} on the unit interval. Doob-transformation techniques consist of a selection of x_{t}-paths procedure. The law of the transformed process is the one of a branching diffusion system of particles, each diffusing like a new process tilde{x}_{t}, superposing an additional drift to the one of x_{t}. Killing and/or branching of tilde{x}_{t}-particles occur at some space-dependent rate lambda. For this transformed process, so in the class of branching diffusions, the question arises as to whether the particle system is sub-critical, critical or super-critical. In the first two cases, extinction occurs with probability one. We apply this circle of ideas to diffusion processes arising in population genetics. In this setup, the process x_{t} is a Wright-Fisher (WF) diffusion, either neutral or with mutations. We study a particular Doob transform which is based on the exponential function in the usual fitness parameter sigma. We have in mind that this is an alternative way to introduce selection or fitness in both WF-like diffusions, leading to branching diffusion models ideas. For this Doob-transform model of fitness, the usual selection drift sigma x(1-x) should be superposed to the one of x_{t} to form tilde{x}_{t} which is the process that can branch, binarily. In the first neutral case, there is a trade-off between branching events giving birth to new particles and absorption at the boundaries, killing the particles. Under our assumptions, the branching diffusion process gets eventually globally extinct in finite time with exponential tails. In the second case with mutations, there is a trade-off between killing events removing some particles from the system and reflection at the boundaries where the particles survive. This branching diffusion process also gets eventually globally extinct but in very long finite time with power-law tails. Our approach relies on the spectral expansion of the transition probability kernels of both x_{t} and tilde{x}_{t}.