Continuum Random Tree Research Articles

Stable trees as mixings of inhomogeneous continuum random trees

It has been claimed in Aldous et al. (2004) that all Lévy trees are mixings of inhomogeneous continuum random trees. We give a rigorous proof of this claim in the case of a stable branching mechanism, relying on a new procedure for recovering the tree distance from the graphical spanning trees that works simultaneously for stable trees and inhomogeneous continuum random trees.

Coloured combinatorial maps and quartic bi-tracial 2-matrix ensembles from noncommutative geometry

We compute the first twenty moments of three convergent quartic bi-tracial 2-matrix ensembles in the large N limit. These ensembles are toy models for Euclidean quantum gravity originally proposed by John Barrett and collaborators. A perturbative solution is found for the first twenty moments using the Schwinger-Dyson equations and properties of certain bi-colored unstable maps associated to the model. We then apply a result of Guionnet et al. to show that the perturbative and convergent solution coincide for a small neighbourhood of the coupling constants. For each model we compute an explicit expression for the free energy, critical points, and critical exponents in the large N limit. In particular, the string susceptibility is found to be γ = 1/2, hinting that the associated universality class of the model is the continuous random tree.

The GHP Scaling Limit of Uniform Spanning Trees in High Dimensions

We show that the Brownian continuum random tree is the Gromov–Hausdorff–Prohorov scaling limit of the uniform spanning tree on high-dimensional graphs including the d-dimensional torus Znd\\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \\usepackage{amsmath} \\usepackage{wasysym} \\usepackage{amsfonts} \\usepackage{amssymb} \\usepackage{amsbsy} \\usepackage{mathrsfs} \\usepackage{upgreek} \\setlength{\\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \\begin{document}$${\\mathbb {Z}}_n^d$$\\end{document} with d>4\\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \\usepackage{amsmath} \\usepackage{wasysym} \\usepackage{amsfonts} \\usepackage{amssymb} \\usepackage{amsbsy} \\usepackage{mathrsfs} \\usepackage{upgreek} \\setlength{\\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \\begin{document}$$d>4$$\\end{document}, the hypercube {0,1}n\\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \\usepackage{amsmath} \\usepackage{wasysym} \\usepackage{amsfonts} \\usepackage{amssymb} \\usepackage{amsbsy} \\usepackage{mathrsfs} \\usepackage{upgreek} \\setlength{\\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \\begin{document}$$\\{0,1\\}^n$$\\end{document}, and transitive expander graphs. Several corollaries for associated quantities are then deduced: convergence in distribution of the rescaled diameter, height and simple random walk on these uniform spanning trees to their continuum analogues on the continuum random tree.

Coupling Bertoin's and Aldous–Pitman's representations of the additive coalescent

AbstractWe construct a coupling between two seemingly very different constructions of the standard additive coalescent, which describes the evolution of masses merging pairwise at rates proportional to their sums. The first construction, due to Aldous and Pitman, involves the components obtained by logging the Brownian continuum random tree (CRT) by a Poissonian rain on its skeleton as time increases. The second one, due to Bertoin, involves the excursions above its running infimum of a linear‐drifted standard Brownian excursion as its drift decreases. Our main tool is the use of an exploration algorithm of the so‐called cut‐tree of the Brownian CRT, which is a tree that encodes the genealogy of the fragmentation of the CRT.

Cutoff on Trees is Rare

We study the simple random walk on trees and give estimates on the mixing and relaxation times. Relying on a seminal result by Basu, Hermon and Peres characterizing cutoff on trees, we give geometric criteria that are easy to verify and allow to determine whether the cutoff phenomenon occurs. We provide a general characterization of families of trees with cutoff, and show how our criteria can be used to prove the absence of cutoff for several classes of trees, including spherically symmetric trees, Galton–Watson trees of a fixed height, and sequences of random trees converging to the Brownian continuum random tree.

A binary embedding of the stable line-breaking construction

We embed Duquesne and Le Gall’s stable tree into a binary compact continuum random tree (CRT) in a way that solves an open problem posed by Goldschmidt and Haas. This CRT can be obtained by applying a recursive construction method of compact CRTs as presented in earlier work to a specific distribution of a random string of beads, i.e. a random interval equipped with a random discrete measure. We also express this CRT as a tree built by replacing all branch points of a stable tree by i.i.d. copies of a Ford CRT, each rescaled by a factor intrinsic to the stable CRT.

Stable graphs: distributions and line-breaking construction

For $\alpha \in (1,2]$, the $\alpha$-stable graph arises as the universal scaling limit of critical random graphs with i.i.d. degrees having a given $\alpha$-dependent power-law tail behavior. It consists of a sequence of compact measured metric spaces (the limiting connected components), each of which is tree-like, in the sense that it consists of an $\mathbb R$-tree with finitely many vertex-identifications (which create cycles). Indeed, given their masses and numbers of vertex-identifications, these components are independent and may be constructed from a spanning $\mathbb R$-tree, which is a biased version of the $\alpha$-stable tree, with a certain number of leaves glued along their paths to the root. In this paper we investigate the geometric properties of such a component with given mass and number of vertex-identifications. We (1) obtain the distribution of its kernel and more generally of its discrete finite-dimensional marginals; we will observe that these distributions are related to the distributions of some configuration models (2) determine the distribution of the $\alpha$-stable graph as a collection of $\alpha$-stable trees glued onto its kernel and (3) present a line-breaking construction, in the same spirit as Aldous' line-breaking construction of the Brownian continuum random tree.

Compactness and fractal dimensions of inhomogeneous continuum random trees

We introduce a new stick-breaking construction for inhomogeneous continuum random trees. This new construction allows us to prove the necessary and sufficient condition for compactness conjectured by Aldous et al. (Probab Theory Relat Fields 129(2):182–218, 2004) by comparison with Lévy trees. We also compute the fractal dimensions (Minkowski, Packing, Hausdorff).

On breadth‐first constructions of scaling limits of random graphs and random unicellular maps

AbstractWe give alternate constructions of (i) the scaling limit of the uniform connected graphs with given fixed surplus, and (ii) the continuum random unicellular map of a given genus that start with a suitably tilted Brownian continuum random tree and make “horizontal” point identifications, at random heights, using the local time measures. Consequently, this can be seen as a continuum analogue of the breadth‐first construction of a finite connected graph. In particular, this yields a breadth‐first construction of the scaling limit of the critical Erdős–Rényi random graph which answers a question posed by Addario‐Berry, Broutin, and Goldschmidt. As a consequence of this breadth‐first construction, we obtain descriptions of the radii, the distance profiles, and the two point functions of these spaces in terms of functionals of tilted Brownian excursions.

Universal height and width bounds for random trees

We prove non-asymptotic stretched exponential tail bounds on the height of a randomly sampled node in a random combinatorial tree, which we use to prove bounds on the heights and widths of random trees from a variety of models. Our results allow us to prove a conjecture and settle an open problem of Janson [13], and nearly prove another conjecture and settle another open problem from the same work (up to a polylogarithmic factor). The key tool for our work is an equivalence in law between the degrees along the path to a random node in a random tree with given degree statistics, and a random truncation of a size-biased ordering of the degrees of such a tree. We also exploit a Poissonization trick introduced by Camarri and Pitman [9] in the context of inhomogeneous continuum random trees, which we adapt to the setting of random trees with fixed degrees. Finally, we propose and justify a change to the conventions of branching process nomenclature: the name “Galton–Watson trees” should be permanently retired by the community, and replaced with the name “Bienaymé trees”.

A geometric representation of fragmentation processes on stable trees

We provide a new geometric representation of a family of fragmentation processes by nested laminations which are compact subsets of the unit disk made of noncrossing chords. We specifically consider a fragmentation, obtained by cutting a random stable tree at random points, which split the tree into smaller subtrees. When coding each of these cutpoints by a chord in the unit disk, we separate the disk into smaller connected components, corresponding to the smaller subtrees of the initial tree. This geometric point of view allows us in particular to highlight a new relation between the Aldous–Pitman fragmentation of the Brownian continuum random tree and minimal factorizations of the n-cycle, that is, factorizations of the permutation (12⋯n) into a product of (n−1) transpositions, proving this way a conjecture of Féray and Kortchemski. We discuss various properties of these new lamination-valued processes, and we notably show that they can be coded by explicit Lévy processes.

The distance profile of rooted and unrooted simply generated trees

AbstractIt is well known that the height profile of a critical conditioned Galton–Watson tree with finite offspring variance converges, after a suitable normalisation, to the local time of a standard Brownian excursion. In this work, we study the distance profile, defined as the profile of all distances between pairs of vertices. We show that after a proper rescaling the distance profile converges to a continuous random function that can be described as the density of distances between random points in the Brownian continuum random tree. We show that this limiting function a.s. is Hölder continuous of any order $\alpha<1$ , and that it is a.e. differentiable. We note that it cannot be differentiable at 0, but leave as open questions whether it is Lipschitz, and whether it is continuously differentiable on the half-line $(0,\infty)$ . The distance profile is naturally defined also for unrooted trees contrary to the height profile that is designed for rooted trees. This is used in our proof, and we prove the corresponding convergence result for the distance profile of random unrooted simply generated trees. As a minor purpose of the present work, we also formalize the notion of unrooted simply generated trees and include some simple results relating them to rooted simply generated trees, which might be of independent interest.

Brownian motion on stable looptrees

In this article, we introduce Brownian motion on α-stable looptrees using resistance techniques, where α∈(1,2). We prove an invariance principle characterising it as the scaling limit of random walks on discrete looptrees, and prove precise local and global bounds on its heat kernel. We also conduct a detailed investigation of the volume growth properties of stable looptrees, and show that the random volume and heat kernel fluctuations are locally log-logarithmic, and globally logarithmic around leading terms of rα and t−αα+1 respectively. These volume fluctuations are the same order as for the Brownian continuum random tree, but the upper volume fluctuations (and corresponding lower heat kernel fluctuations) are different to those of stable trees.

The Tutte embedding of the mated-CRT map converges to Liouville quantum gravity

We prove that the Tutte embeddings (a.k.a. harmonic/barycentric embeddings) of certain random planar maps converge to γ-Liouville quantum gravity (γ-LQG). Specifically, we treat mated-CRT maps, which are discretized matings of correlated continuum random trees, and γ ranges from 0 to 2 as one varies the correlation parameter. We also show that the associated space-filling path on the embedded map converges to space-filling SLEκ for κ=16/γ2 (in the annealed sense) and that simple random walk on the embedded map converges to Brownian motion (in the quenched sense). This work constitutes the first proof that a discrete conformal embedding of a random planar map converges to LQG. Many more such statements have been conjectured. Since the mated-CRT map can be viewed as a coarse-grained approximation to other random planar maps (the UIPT, tree-weighted maps, bipolar-oriented maps, etc.), our results indicate a potential approach for proving that embeddings of these maps converge to LQG as well. To prove the main result, we establish several (independently interesting) theorems about LQG surfaces decorated by space-filling SLE. There is a natural way to use the SLE curve to divide the plane into “cells” corresponding to vertices of the mated-CRT map. We study the law of the shape of the origin-containing cell, in particular proving moments for the ratio of its squared diameter to its area. We also give bounds on the degree of the origin-containing cell and establish a form of ergodicity for the entire configuration. Ultimately, we use these properties to show (with the help of a general theorem proved in a separate paper) that random walk on these cells converges to a time change of Brownian motion, which in turn leads to the Tutte embedding result.

On quasisymmetric embeddings of the Brownian map and continuum trees

The Brownian map is a model of random geometry on the sphere and as such an important object in probability theory and physics. It has been linked to Liouville Quantum Gravity and much research has been devoted to it. One open question asks for a canonical embedding of the Brownian map into the sphere or other, more abstract, metric spaces. Similarly, Liouville Quantum Gravity has been shown to be “equivalent” to the Brownian map but the exact nature of the correspondence (i.e. embedding) is still unknown. In this article we show that any embedding of the Brownian map or continuum random tree into {{,mathrm{mathbb {R}},}}^d, {{,mathrm{mathbb {S}},}}^d, {{,mathrm{mathbb {T}},}}^d, or more generally any doubling metric space, cannot be quasisymmetric. We achieve this with the aid of dimension theory by identifying a metric structure that is invariant under quasisymmetric mappings (such as isometries) and which implies infinite Assouad dimension. We show, using elementary methods, that this structure is almost surely present in the Brownian continuum random tree and the Brownian map. We further show that snowflaking the metric is not sufficient to find an embedding and discuss continuum trees as a tool to studying “fractal functions”.

Invariance principles for random walks in random environment on trees

In arXiv:1609.05666v1 [math.PR] a functional limit theorem was proved. It states that symmetric processes associated with resistance metric measure spaces converge when the underlying spaces converge with respect to the Gromov-Hausdorff-vague topology, and a certain uniform recurrence condition is satisfied. Such a theorem finds particularly nice applications if the resistance metric measure space is a metric measure tree. To illustrate this, we state functional limit theorems in old and new examples of suitably rescaled random walks in random environment on trees. First, we take a critical Galton-Watson tree conditioned on its total progeny and a non-lattice branching random walk on $\mathbb{R}^d$ indexed by it. Then, conditional on that, we consider a biased random walk on the range of the preceding. Here, by non-lattice we mean that distinct branches of the tree do not intersect once mapped in $\mathbb{R}^d$. This excludes the possibility that the random walk on the range may jump from one branch to the other without returning to the recent common ancestor. We prove, after introducing the bias parameter $\beta^{n^{-1/4}}$, for some $\beta>1$, that the biased random walk on the range of a large critical non-lattice branching random walk converges to a Brownian motion in a random Gaussian potential on Aldous' continuum random tree (CRT). Our second new result introduces the scaling limit of the edge-reinforced random walk on a size-conditioned Galton-Watson tree with finite variance as a Brownian motion in a random Gaussian potential on the CRT with a drift proportional to the distance to the root.

Self-similar real trees defined as fixed points and their geometric properties

We consider fixed point equations for probability measures charging measured compact metric spaces that naturally yield continuum random trees. On the one hand, we study the existence/uniqueness of the fixed points and the convergence of the corresponding iterative schemes. On the other hand, we study the geometric properties of the random measured real trees that are fixed points, in particular their fractal properties. We obtain bounds on the Minkowski and Hausdorff dimension, that are proved tight in a number of applications, including the very classical continuum random tree, but also for the dual trees of random recursive triangulations of the disk introduced by Curien and Le Gall [Ann Probab, vol. 39, 2011]. The method happens to be especially efficient to treat cases for which the mass measure on the real tree induced by natural encodings only provides weak estimates on the Hausdorff dimensions.

K-cut model for the Brownian continuum random tree

To model the destruction of a resilient network, Cai, Holmgren, Devroye and Skerman introduced the k-cut model on a random tree, as an extension to the classic problem of cutting down random trees. Berzunza, Cai and Holmgren later proved that the total number of cuts in the k-cut model to isolate the root of a Galton–Watson tree with a finite-variance offspring law and conditioned to have n nodes, when divided by n1−1∕2k, converges in distribution to some random variable defined on the Brownian CRT. We provide here a direct construction of the limit random variable, relying upon the Aldous–Pitman fragmentation process and a deterministic time change.

Exchangeable hierarchies and mass-structure of weighted real trees

Rooted, weighted continuum random trees are used to describe limits of sequences of random discrete trees. Formally, they are random quadruples $(\mathcal {T},d,r,p)$, where $(\mathcal {T},d)$ is a tree-like metric space, $r\in \mathcal {T}$ is a distinguished root, and $p$ is a probability measure on this space. Intuitively, these trees have a combinatorial “underlying branching structure” implied by their topology but otherwise independent of the metric $d$. We explore various ways of making this rigorous, using the weight $p$ to do so without losing the fractal complexity possible in continuum trees. We introduce a notion of mass-structural equivalence and show that two rooted, weighted $\mathbb {R}$-trees are equivalent in this sense if and only if the discrete hierarchies derived by i.i.d. sampling from their weights, in a manner analogous to Kingman’s paintbox, have the same distribution. We introduce a family of trees, called “interval partition trees” that serve as representatives of mass-structure equivalence classes, and which naturally represent the laws of the aforementioned hierarchies.

Scaling limit of random forests with prescribed degree sequences

In this paper, we consider the random plane forest uniformly drawn from all possible plane forests with a given degree sequence. Under suitable conditions on the degree sequences, we consider the limit of a sequence of such forests with the number of vertices tends to infinity in terms of Gromov–Hausdorff–Prokhorov topology. This work falls into the general framework of showing convergence of random combinatorial structures to certain Gromov–Hausdorff scaling limits, described in terms of the Brownian Continuum Random Tree (BCRT), pioneered by the work of Aldous (Ann. Probab. 19 (1991) 1–28; In Stochastic Analysis (Durham, 1990) (1991) 23–70 Cambridge Univ. Press; Ann. Probab. 21 (1993) 248–289). In fact, we identify the limiting random object as a sequence of random real trees encoded by excursions of some first passage bridges reflected at minimum. We establish such convergence by studying the associated Lukasiewicz walk of the degree sequences. In particular, our work is closely related to and uses the results from the recent work of Broutin and Marckert (Random Structures Algorithms 44 (2014) 290–316) on scaling limit of random trees with prescribed degree sequences, and the work of Addario-Berry (Random Structures Algorithms 41 (2012) 253–261) on tail bounds of the height of a random tree with prescribed degree sequence.