Hereditary tree growth and Lévy forests (Q2274253)

The authors work with the space of pointed isometry classes of locally compact rooted real trees equipped with the Gromov-Hausdorff distance, a framework initiated by \textit{D. Aldous} [Ann. Probab. 19, No. 1, 1--28 (1991; Zbl 0722.60013); ibid. 21, No. 1, 248--289 (1993; Zbl 0791.60009)] and \textit{S. N. Evans} et al. [Probab. Theory Relat. Fields 134, No. 1, 81--126 (2006; Zbl 1086.60050)]. Tightness criteria in this space and limit theorems for growing families of trees are discussed, the notion ``hereditary property'' is introduced, and reduction of trees by a given hereditary property considered. A special case of the latter is leaf-length erasure (``trimming''), first studied by \textit{H. Kesten} [Ann. Inst. Henri Poincaré, Probab. Stat. 22, 425--487 (1986; Zbl 0632.60106)] for discrete trees. The results are applied to Galton-Watson trees with exponentially distributed edge lengths, a class preserved by hereditary reduction. Then families of Galton-Watson trees are investigated which are consistent under hereditary reduction (``growth processes''). It is shown that the corresponding families of offspring distributions are characterized be the branching mechanism of a continuous-state branching process and that growing Galton-Watson trees yields in the limit Lévy trees, as originally introduced by \textit{J.-F. Le Gall} and \textit{Y. Le Jan} [Ann. Probab. 26, No. 1, 213--252 (1998; Zbl 0948.60071)]. This then leads to a characterization of the laws of Lévy forests in terms of leaf-length erasure and to invariance principles for discrete Galton-Watson trees.