Explosion of Crump-Mode-Jagers processes with critical immediate offspring

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Alsmeyer, Gerold, Kolesko, Konrad, Meiners, Matthias, Stonner, Jakob
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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_version_ 1866917040870129664
author Alsmeyer, Gerold
Kolesko, Konrad
Meiners, Matthias
Stonner, Jakob
author_facet Alsmeyer, Gerold
Kolesko, Konrad
Meiners, Matthias
Stonner, Jakob
contents We study the phenomenon of explosion in general (Crump-Mode-Jagers) branching processes, which refers to the event where an infinite number of individuals are born in finite time. In a critical setting where the expected number of immediate offspring per individual is exactly one, whether or not explosion occurs depends on the fine properties of the reproduction point process. We provide two sufficient conditions for explosion in these CMJ processes. The first uses a comparison with Galton-Watson processes in varying environments, while the second relies on a comparison with Bellman-Harris branching processes. Our main result is an equivalent characterization of explosion, expressed as an integral test, in the case where the reproduction point process is Poisson. For the derivation, we also study the fixed-point equation associated with a smoothing transform, which is known to describe the distribution of the explosion time. We use multiplicative martingales to show that this distribution is an attractive fixed point of the smoothing transform, which in particular implies its uniqueness modulo an additive shift.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_05476
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Explosion of Crump-Mode-Jagers processes with critical immediate offspring
Alsmeyer, Gerold
Kolesko, Konrad
Meiners, Matthias
Stonner, Jakob
Probability
60J80, 39B22, 60G55
We study the phenomenon of explosion in general (Crump-Mode-Jagers) branching processes, which refers to the event where an infinite number of individuals are born in finite time. In a critical setting where the expected number of immediate offspring per individual is exactly one, whether or not explosion occurs depends on the fine properties of the reproduction point process. We provide two sufficient conditions for explosion in these CMJ processes. The first uses a comparison with Galton-Watson processes in varying environments, while the second relies on a comparison with Bellman-Harris branching processes. Our main result is an equivalent characterization of explosion, expressed as an integral test, in the case where the reproduction point process is Poisson. For the derivation, we also study the fixed-point equation associated with a smoothing transform, which is known to describe the distribution of the explosion time. We use multiplicative martingales to show that this distribution is an attractive fixed point of the smoothing transform, which in particular implies its uniqueness modulo an additive shift.
title Explosion of Crump-Mode-Jagers processes with critical immediate offspring
topic Probability
60J80, 39B22, 60G55
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.05476