Integral representation of probabilities in Kingman coalescent

Abstract

Kingman Coalescent was first proposed by Kingman [7] in population genetics to describe population's genealogical structure. Now it becomes a bench-mark model for coalescent process. Extensive studies have been conducted on Kingman coalescent. In particular, its explicit finite time distribution was obtained by Tavaré [12]. However, very few people use this explicit distribution to do analysis for it is an intractable infinite series. In this article, we are going to establish a complex integral representation for the finite time distribution, then we use steepest descent method to analyze this integral representation to obtain local central limit theorem at small time regime.

11 pages, 2 figures