The variance of the average depth of a pure birth process converges to 7

• Published in: Statistics & probability letters Vol. 150; pp. 88 - 93
• Main Authors: Duffy, Ken R., Meli, Gianfelice, Shneer, Seva
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier B.V 01.07.2019
• Subjects: Pure birth process; Variance of the average depth; Variance of the average depth; 60J85; Pure birth process; 92D25
• ISSN: 0167-7152; 1879-2103
• DOI: 10.1016/j.spl.2019.02.015

If trees are constructed from a pure birth process and one defines the depth of a leaf to be the number of edges to its root, it is known that the variance in the depth of a randomly selected leaf of a randomly selected tree grows linearly in time. In this letter, we instead consider the variance of the average depth of leaves within each individual tree, establishing that, in contrast, it converges to a constant, 7. This result indicates that while the variance in leaf depths amongst the ensemble of pure birth processes undergoes large fluctuations, the average depth across individual trees is much more consistent.