Genealogies in structured frequency-dependent branching processes
Our work delves into the universality class of a very celebrated entity in population genetics : Kingman’s coalescent. This object serves as baseline models for panmictic, neutral populations. More generally, Λ−coalescents catalog the genealogies of constant–sized exchangeable populations models known as Cannings models. We establish a broad class of regulated multitype individual-based models extending beyond exchangeable and fix-sized populations, yet for which the scaling limit of the genealogies sampled at a given time is still Kingman’s coalescent. Thus, our result strides towards refining the intuition that neutral, Cannings–like genealogies can arise from complex interactions. We prove convergence in distribution of the genealogies for the Gromov–Weak topology, using a change of measure and building on the multiple spine decomposition formalism developed by Foutel-Rodier and Schertzer (2023). The underlying purpose is to formulate a versatile methodology to derive scaling limits of genealogies within structured populations subject to type–frequency interactions. This method streamlines computations on forest-valued processes to a fine–grained analysis of the simpler stochastic process driving the type frequencies in the population. Kingman’s coalescence rates are recovered from the contribution of the spinal immigration to a small deviation of this frequency process, and the underneath spatial structure only influences the effective population size, hence the genetic diversity of the population. This is joint work with Félix Foutel-Rodier (MAP5) and Emmanuel Schertzer (University of Vienna).