Subtree prune and regraft: a reversible real tree-valued Markov process (Q2497165)

The authors study asymptotics of the simplest possible tree-valued Markov chain based on the subtree prune and regraft. More precisely they consider the continuous time Markov process which arises as a limit when the number of vertices in the phylogenic tree tends to infinity, while the two edges that are chosen for cutting and for reattaching are chosen without replacement from the edges of the current tree. Moreover the edge lengths are rescaled by a constant factor in such a way that the initial tree converges to a compact real tree and the time scale of the Markov chain is speed up by a respective factor. The line of reasoning is based on the Dirichlet form techniques which allow to construct and analyze the reversible symmetric Markov process with the Brownian continuum walk as the stationary distribution. The authors introduce a Gromov-Hausdorff metric based on the Prokhorov distance to metrize the space of pairs of compact real trees and their weights that implies its completeness and separability. One of the important results found in the paper is that the trivial tree is essentially polar.