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A Markovian Growth Dynamics on Rooted Binary Trees Evolving According to the Gompertz Curve

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Abstract

Inspired by biological dynamics, we consider a growth Markov process taking values on the space of rooted binary trees, similar to the Aldous-Shields (Probab. Theory Relat. Fields 79(4):509–542, 1988) model. Fix n≥1 and β>0. We start at time 0 with the tree composed of a root only. At any time, each node with no descendants, independently from the other nodes, produces two successors at rate β(nk)/n, where k is the distance from the node to the root. Denote by Z n (t) the number of nodes with no descendants at time t and let T n =β −1 nln(n/ln4)+(ln2)/(2β). We prove that 2n Z n (T n +), τ∈ℝ, converges to the Gompertz curve exp(−(ln2) e βτ). We also prove a central limit theorem for the martingale associated to Z n (t).

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Correspondence to C. Landim.

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B.F. Svaiter was partially supported by CNPq grants 302962/2011-5 and 474944/2010-7, FAPERJ grant E-26/102.940/2011 and by PRONEX-Optimization.

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Landim, C., Portugal, R.D. & Svaiter, B.F. A Markovian Growth Dynamics on Rooted Binary Trees Evolving According to the Gompertz Curve. J Stat Phys 148, 565–578 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10955-012-0549-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10955-012-0549-z

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