Branching processes with immigration in atypical random environment

TL;DR

This paper studies a branching process with random environment and immigration, showing that heavy-tailed environmental factors can cause extremely heavy tails in population size distribution, with results extending previous work to long-tailed environments.

Contribution

It generalizes prior results by analyzing long-tailed environmental distributions and establishes the principle that rare, extreme environmental conditions dominate large population deviations.

Findings

Population size tails are asymptotically equivalent to n times the tail of the environmental distribution.

Heavy tails in environment can lead to even heavier tails in population size distribution.

The main cause of large populations is a single, extremely unfavorable environmental parameter.

Abstract

Motivated by a seminal paper of Kesten et al. (1975) we consider a branching process with a geometric offspring distribution with i.i.d. random environmental parameters $A_n$, $n\ge 1$ and size -1 immigration in each generation. In contrast to above mentioned paper we assume that the environment is long-tailed, that is that the distribution $F$ of $\xi_n := \log ((1-A_n)/A_n)$ is long-tailed. We prove that although the offspring distribution is light-tailed, the environment itself can produce extremely heavy tails of the distribution of the population size in the n-th generation which becomes even heavier with increase of n. More precisely, we prove that, for any n, the distribution tail $\mathbb{P}(Z_n > m)$ of the $n$-th population size $Z_n$ is asymptotically equivalent to $n\overline{F}(\log m)$ as $m$ grows. In this way we generalize Bhattacharya and Palmowski (2019) who proved this result in the case $n=1$ for regularly varying environment $F$ with parameter $\alpha >1$. Further, for a subcritical branching process with subexponentially distributed $\xi_n$, we provide the asymptotics for the distribution tail $\mathbb{P}(Z_n>m)$ which are valid uniformly for all $n$, and also for the stationary tail distribution. Then we establish the "principle of a single atypical environment" which says that the main cause for the number of particles to be large is a presence of a single very small environmental parameter $A_k$.