Cluster growth in the dynamical Erd\H{o}s-R\'{e}nyi process with forest fires

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the growth of clusters in a forest fire model, revealing that the cluster size process behaves as an explosive branching process with a probabilistic interpretation of associated coagulation equations.

Contribution

It provides a detailed description of the cluster size process in the forest fire model and links it to a probabilistic interpretation of coagulation equations.

Findings

Cluster size process is an explosive branching process.

Characteristic curves have a probabilistic interpretation.

Model describes cluster dynamics with fires causing instantaneous burns.

Abstract

We investigate the growth of clusters within the forest fire model of R\'{a}th and T\'{o}th [22]. The model is a continuous-time Markov process, similar to the dynamical Erd\H{o}s-R\'{e}nyi random graph but with the addition of so-called fires. A vertex may catch fire at any moment and, when it does so, causes all edges within its connected cluster to burn, meaning that they instantaneously disappear. Each burned edge may later reappear. We give a precise description of the process $C_t$ of the size of the cluster of a tagged vertex, in the limit as the number of vertices in the model tends to infinity. We show that $C_t$ is an explosive branching process with a time-inhomogeneous offspring distribution and instantaneous return to $1$ on each explosion. Additionally, we show that the characteristic curves used to analyse the Smoluchowski-type coagulation equations associated to the model have a probabilistic interpretation in terms of the process $C_t$.