Asymptotic Normality of Almost Local Functionals in Conditioned Galton-Watson Trees

An additive functional of a rooted tree is a functional that can be calculated recursively as the sum of the values of the functional over the branches, plus a certain toll function. Janson recently proved a central limit theorem for additive functionals of conditioned Galton-Watson trees under the assumption that the toll function is local, i.e. only depends on a fixed neighbourhood of the root. We extend his result to functionals that are almost local, thus covering a wider range of functionals. Our main result is illustrated by two explicit examples: the (logarithm of) the number of matchings, and a functional stemming from a tree reduction process that was studied by Hackl, Heuberger, Kropf, and Prodinger

Local limits of galton-watson trees conditioned on the number of protected nodes

We consider a marking procedure of the vertices of a tree where each vertex is marked independently from the others with a probability that depends only on its out-degree. We prove that a critical Galton-Watson tree conditioned on having a large number of marked vertices converges in distribution to the associated size-biased tree. We then apply this result to give the limit in distribution of a critical Galton-Watson tree conditioned on having a large number of protected nodes

Limit Laws for Functions of Fringe trees for Binary Search Trees and Recursive Trees

We prove limit theorems for sums of functions of subtrees of binary search trees and random recursive trees. In particular, we give simple new proofs of the fact that the number of fringe trees of size $k=k_n$ in the binary search tree and the random recursive tree (of total size $n$) asymptotically has a Poisson distribution if $k\rightarrow\infty$, and that the distribution is asymptotically normal for $k=o(\sqrt{n})$. Furthermore, we prove similar results for the number of subtrees of size $k$ with some required property $P$, for example the number of copies of a certain fixed subtree $T$. Using the Cram\'er-Wold device, we show also that these random numbers for different fixed subtrees converge jointly to a multivariate normal distribution. As an application of the general results, we obtain a normal limit law for the number of $\ell$-protected nodes in a binary search tree or random recursive tree. The proofs use a new version of a representation by Devroye, and Stein's method (for both normal and Poisson approximation) together with certain couplings