Empirical distribution of ancestral lineages in populations with density-dependent interactions

Abstract

We study a density-dependent Markov jump process describing a population where each individual is characterized by a type, and reproduces at rates depending both on its type and on the population type distribution. We are interested in the empirical distribution of ancestral lineages in the population process. First, we exhibit a time-inhomogeneous Markov process, which allows to capture the behavior of a sampled lineage in the population process. This is achieved through a many-to-one formula, which relates the expected value of a functional evaluated over the lineages in the population process to the expectation of the functional evaluated along this time-inhomogeneous process. This provides a direct interpretation of the underlying survivorship bias, as illustrated on a minimalistic population process. Second, we consider the large population regime, when the population size grows to infinity. Under classical assumptions, the population type distribution converges to a deterministic limit. Here, we focus on the empirical distribution of ancestral lineages in this large population limit, for which we establish a many-to-one formula. Using coupling arguments, we further quantify the approximation error which arises when sampling in this large population approximation instead of the finite-size population process.