Tree/endofunction bijections and concentration inequalities (Q2144318)

Summary: We demonstrate a method for proving precise concentration inequalities in uniformly random trees on \(n\) vertices, where \(n\geqslant 1\) is a fixed positive integer. The method uses a bijection between mappings \(f:\{1, \ldots, n\} \to \{1, \ldots, n\}\) and doubly rooted trees on \(n\) vertices. The main application is a concentration inequality for the number of vertices connected to an independent set in a uniformly random tree, which is then used to prove partial unimodality of its independent set sequence. While inequalities for random trees often use combinatorial arguments, our argument is perhaps more probabilistic.