Diffusive limits of two-parameter ordered Chinese Restaurant Process up-down chains

Abstract

We construct a two-parameter family of Feller diffusions on the set of open subsets of $(0,1)$ that arise as diffusive limits of two-parameter ordered Chinese Restaurant Process up-down chains. The diffusions we construct are natural ordered analogues of Petrov's two-parameter extension of Ethier and Kurtz's infinitely-many-neutral-alleles diffusion model. Recently, there has been significant interest in ordered analogues of the diffusions Petrov constructed. Existing methods for constructing such processes have been based on pathwise methods using marked L\'evy processes and an outstanding conjecture about these processes is that they are, in fact, the diffusive limit of the ordered Chinese Restaurant Process up-down chains that we consider here. We make progress on this conjecture by showing that the diffusive limit of the ordered Chinese Restaurant Process up-down chains exists. Moreover, our methods yield a simple, explicit description of the generator of the limiting processes on a core described in terms of quasisymmetric functions.