Convergence of bi-measure R-trees and the pruning process.

In (Ann. Inst. Henri Poincaré Probab. Stat. 34 (1998) 637-686) a tree-valued Markov chain is derived by pruning off more and more subtrees along the edges of a Galton-Watson tree. More recently, in (Ann. Probab. 40 (2012) 1167-1211), a continuous analogue of the tree-valued pruning dynamics is constructed along Lévy trees. In the present paper, we provide a new topology which allows to link the discrete and the continuous dynamics by considering them as instances of the same strong Markov process with different initial conditions. We construct this pruning process on the space of so-called bi-measure trees, which are metric measure spaces with an additional pruning measure. The pruning measure is assumed to be finite on finite trees, but not necessarily locally finite. We also characterize the pruning process analytically via its Markovian generator and show that it is continuous in the initial bi-measure tree. A series of examples is given, which include the finite variance offspring case where the pruning measure is the length measure on the underlying tree. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]