A branching process approach to the survival of populations: skeleton process and stochastic introgression
 
 
Description:  In this talk we present branching processes as a tool to model the evolution of populations which are, in principle, doomed to extinction but manage to survive. Survival is usually achieved through the appearance of different types of individuals that give an “advantage” to the initial population. For example: i) virus placed in a new and hostile environment often develop mutations which are better adapted to the new environment; ii) stochastic introgression (which is the process whereby a specified gene from one population can become permanently incorporated into the genome of another population) is achieved through a sequence of many advantageous changes.

We will start with the basic definitions and some elementary results concerning (multitype) branching processes. Then we proceed with the presentation of recent results regarding the populations described in previous examples, namely: i) description of the skeleton process, conditioned on the appearance of mutants;  ii) derivation of the hazard rate for an introgression event. The skeleton is a branching process that describes typical survival scenarios for a near-critical Galton-Watson branching process.

This is joint work with Atiyo Ghosh, Patsy Haccou and Serik Sagitov.
Date:  2015-07-17
Start Time:   14:30
Speaker:  Maria Conceição Serra (CMAT, Univ. Minho)
Institution:  CMAT, Univ. Minho
Place:  Sala 5.5
Research Groups: -Probability and Statistics
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