Killing versus catastrophes in birth-death processes and an application to population genetics

Abstract: We establish connections between the absorption probabilities of a class of birth-death processes with killing, and the stationary tail distributions of a related class of birth-death processes with catastrophes. Major ingredients of the proofs are an excursion decomposition of sample paths, a generalised detailed-balance condition, and representations of our processes in terms of superpositions of simpler processes. An overarching role is played by Siegmund duality, which allows us to invert the relationship between the processes. We apply our results to a pair of ancestral processes in population genetics, namely the killed ancestral selection graph and the pruned lookdown ancestral selection graph, in a finite population setting and its diffusion limit.