Quasistationary Distributions and Fleming-Viot Processes in Finite Spaces

Abstract

Consider a continuous-time Markov process with transition rates matrixQin the state space Λ ⋃ {0}. In the associated Fleming-Viot processNparticles evolve independently in Λ with transition rates matrixQuntil one of them attempts to jump to state 0. At this moment the particle jumps to one of the positions of the other particles, chosen uniformly at random. When Λ is finite, we show that the empirical distribution of the particles at a fixed time converges asN→ ∞ to the distribution of a single particle at the same time conditioned on not touching {0}. Furthermore, the empirical profile of the unique invariant measure for the Fleming-Viot process withNparticles converges asN→ ∞ to the unique quasistationary distribution of the one-particle motion. A key element of the approach is to show that the two-particle correlations are of order 1 /N.