A countable representation of the Fleming-Viot measure-valued diffusion

Abstract

The Fleming-Viot measure-valued diffusion arises as the infinite population limit of various discrete genetic models with general type space. The paper gives a countable construction of the process as the empirical measure carried by a certain interactive particle system. This explicit representation facilitates the study of various properties of the Fleming-Viot process. The construction also carries versions of the familiar genealogical processes from population genetics, in particular, Kingman's coalescent, thus unifying the genealogical and measure-valued approaches to the subject.