October 2024
·
19 Reads
Journal of Applied Probability
We investigate some aspects of the problem of the estimation of birth distributions (BDs) in multi-type Galton–Watson trees (MGWs) with unobserved types. More precisely, we consider two-type MGWs called spinal-structured trees. This kind of tree is characterized by a spine of special individuals whose BD is different from the other individuals in the tree (called normal, and whose BD is denoted by ). In this work, we show that even in such a very structured two-type population, our ability to distinguish the two types and estimate and is constrained by a trade-off between the growth-rate of the population and the similarity of and . Indeed, if the growth-rate is too large, large deviation events are likely to be observed in the sampling of the normal individuals, preventing us from distinguishing them from special ones. Roughly speaking, our approach succeeds if , where r is the exponential growth-rate of the population and is a divergence measuring the dissimilarity between and .