Power-Law Tails in a Fitness-Driven Model for Biological Evolution

Abstract

We study a discrete-time stochastic process that can also be interpreted as a model for a viral evolution. A distinguishing feature of our process is power-law tails due to dynamics that resembles preferential attachment models. In the model we study, a population is partitioned into sites, with each site labeled by a uniquely-assigned real number in the interval $[0,1]$ known as fitness. The population size is a discrete-time transient birth-and-death process with probability $p$ of birth and $1-p$ of death. The fitness is assigned at birth according to the following rule: the new member of the population either "mutates" with probability $r$, creating a new site uniformly distributed on $[0,1]$ or "inherits" with probability $1-r$, joining an existing site with probability proportional to the site's size. At each death event, a member from the site with the lowest fitness is killed. The number of sites eventually tends to infinity if and only if $pr>1-p$. Under this assumption, we show that as time tends to infinity, the joint empirical measure of site size and fitness (proportion of population in sites of size and fitness in given ranges) converges a.s. to the product of a modified Yule distribution and the uniform distribution on $[(1-p)/(pr),1]$. Our approach is based on the method developed in \cite{similar-but-different}. The model and the results were independently obtained by Roy and Tanemura in [RT].