Two-sided immigration, emigration and symmetry properties of self-similar interval partition evolutions

Abstract

Forman et al. (2020+) constructed $(\alpha,\theta)$-interval partition evolutions for $\alpha\in(0,1)$ and $\theta\ge 0$, in which the total sums of interval lengths ("total mass") evolve as squared Bessel processes of dimension $2\theta$, where $\theta\ge 0$ acts as an immigration parameter. These evolutions have pseudo-stationary distributions related to regenerative Poisson--Dirichlet interval partitions. In this paper we study symmetry properties of $(\alpha,\theta)$-interval partition evolutions. Furthermore, we introduce a three-parameter family ${\rm SSIP}^{(\alpha)}(\theta_1,\theta_2)$ of self-similar interval partition evolutions that have separate left and right immigration parameters $\theta_1\ge 0$ and $\theta_2\ge 0$. They also have squared Bessel total mass processes of dimension $2\theta$, where $\theta=\theta_1+\theta_2-\alpha\ge-\alpha$ covers emigration as well as immigration. Under the constraint $\max\{\theta_1,\theta_2\}\ge\alpha$, we prove that an ${\rm SSIP}^{(\alpha)}(\theta_1,\theta_2)$-evolution is pseudo-stationary for a new distribution on interval partitions, whose ranked sequence of lengths has Poisson--Dirichlet distribution with parameters $\alpha$ and $\theta$, but we are unable to cover all parameters without developing a limit theory for composition-valued Markov chains, which we do in a sequel paper.