Coalescent processes obtained from supercritical Galton–Watson processes

Abstract

Consider a population model in which there are N individuals in each generation. One can obtain a coalescent tree by sampling n individuals from the current generation and following their ancestral lines backwards in time. It is well-known that under certain conditions on the joint distribution of the family sizes, one gets a limiting coalescent process as N→∞ after a suitable rescaling. Here we consider a model in which the numbers of offspring for the individuals are independent, but in each generation only N of the offspring are chosen at random for survival. We assume further that if X is the number of offspring of an individual, then P( X⩾ k)∼ Ck − a for some a>0 and C>0. We show that, depending on the value of a, the limit may be Kingman's coalescent, in which each pair of ancestral lines merges at rate one, a coalescent with multiple collisions, or a coalescent with simultaneous multiple collisions.