A two-parameter family of measure-valued diffusions with Poisson-Dirichlet stationary distributions
Abstract
We give a pathwise construction of a two-parameter family of
purely-atomic-measure-valued diffusions in which ranked masses of atoms are
stationary with the Poisson-Dirichlet$(\alpha,\theta)$ distributions, for
$\alpha\in (0,1)$ and $\theta\ge 0$. This resolves a conjecture of Feng and Sun
(2010). We build on our previous work on $(\alpha,0)$- and
$(\alpha,\alpha)$-interval partition evolutions. Indeed, we first extract a
self-similar superprocess from the levels of stable processes whose jumps are
decorated with squared Bessel excursions and distinct allelic types. We
complete our construction by time-change and normalisation to unit mass. In a
companion paper, we show that the ranked masses of the measure-valued processes
evolve according to a two-parameter family of diffusions introduced by Petrov
(2009), extending work of Ethier and Kurtz (1981). These ranked-mass diffusions
arise as continuum limits of up-down Markov chains on Chinese restaurant
processes.