Distribution of external branch lengths in Yule histories (Q6199182)

Summary: The Yule branching process is a classical model for the random generation of gene tree topologies in population genetics. It generates binary ranked trees -- also called \textit{histories} -- with a finite number \(n\) of leaves. We study the lengths \(\ell_1 > \ell_2 > \cdots > \ell_k > \cdots\) of the external branches of a Yule generated random history of size \(n\), where the length of an external branch is defined as the rank of its parent node. When \(n \rightarrow \infty\), we show that the random variable \(\ell_k\), once rescaled as \(\frac{n-\ell_k}{\sqrt{n/2}}\), follows a \(\chi\)-distribution with \(2k\) degrees of freedom, with mean \(\mathbb{E}(\ell_k) \sim n\) and variance \(\mathbb{V}(\ell_k) \sim n \big(k-\frac{\pi k^{2}}{16^{k}} \binom{2k}{k}^2\big)\). Our results contribute to the study of the combinatorial features of Yule generated gene trees, in which external branches are associated with singleton mutations affecting individual gene copies.