Exchangeable hierarchies and mass-structure of weighted real trees

Rooted, weighted continuum random trees are used to describe limits of sequences of random discrete trees. Formally, they are random quadruples $(\mathcal {T},d,r,p)$, where $(\mathcal {T},d)$ is a tree-like metric space, $r\in \mathcal {T}$ is a distinguished root, and $p$ is a probability measure on this space. Intuitively, these trees have a combinatorial “underlying branching structure” implied by their topology but otherwise independent of the metric $d$. We explore various ways of making this rigorous, using the weight $p$ to do so without losing the fractal complexity possible in continuum trees. We introduce a notion of mass-structural equivalence and show that two rooted, weighted $\mathbb {R}$-trees are equivalent in this sense if and only if the discrete hierarchies derived by i.i.d. sampling from their weights, in a manner analogous to Kingman’s paintbox, have the same distribution. We introduce a family of trees, called “interval partition trees” that serve as representatives of mass-structure equivalence classes, and which naturally represent the laws of the aforementioned hierarchies.