# The coalescent structure of continuous-time Galton-Watson trees

## TL;DR

This paper investigates the ancestral structure of large, near-critical continuous-time Galton-Watson trees, revealing a scaling limit where the coalescent process resembles Kingman's coalescent but with complex coalescence times influenced by population fluctuations.

## Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of the coalescent structure in near-critical Galton-Watson trees, including explicit formulas for coalescent times and a novel genealogical construction.

## Key findings

- Coalescent process converges to Kingman's coalescent in the limit.
- Explicit distribution formulas for coalescent times.
- Population fluctuations significantly affect genealogical structures.

## Abstract

Take a continuous-time Galton-Watson tree. If the system survives until a large time $T$, then choose $k$ particles uniformly from those alive. What does the ancestral tree drawn out by these $k$ particles look like? Some special cases are known but we give a more complete answer. We concentrate on near-critical cases where the mean number of offspring is $1+\mu/T$ for some $\mu\in\mathbb{R}$, and show that a scaling limit exists as $T\to\infty$. Viewed backwards in time, the resulting coalescent process is topologically equivalent to Kingman's coalescent, but the times of coalescence have an interesting and highly non-trivial structure. The randomly fluctuating population size, as opposed to constant size populations where the Kingman coalescent more usually arises, have a pronounced effect on both the results and the method of proof required. We give explicit formulas for the distribution of the coalescent times, as well as a construction of the genealogical tree involving a mixture of independent and identically distributed random variables. In general subcritical and supercritical cases it is not possible to give such explicit formulas, but we highlight the special case of birth-death processes.