The Feller diffusion as the limit of a coalescent point process

Abstract: The Feller diffusion is studied as the limit of a coalescent point process in which the density of the node height distribution is skewed towards zero. Using a unified approach, a number of recent results pertaining to scaling limits of branching processes are reinterpreted as properties of the Feller diffusion arising from this limit. The notion of Bernoulli sampling of a finite population is extended to the diffusion limit to cover finite Poisson-distributed samples drawn from infinite continuum populations. We show that the coalescent tree of a Poisson-sampled Feller diffusion corresponds to a coalescent point process with a node height distribution taking the same algebraic form as that of a Bernoulli-sampled birth-death process. By adapting methods for analysing k-sampled birth-death processes, in which the sample size is pre-specified, we develop methods for studying the coalescent properties of the k-sampled Feller diffusion.