Wright-Fisher diffusion with negative mutation rates

We study a family of n-dimensional diffusions, taking values in the unit simplex of vectors with nonnegative coordinates that add up to one. These processes satisfy stochastic differential equations which are similar to the ones for the classical Wright-Fisher diffusions, except that the "mutation rates" are now nonpositive. This model, suggested by Aldous, appears in the study of a conjectured diffusion limit for a Markov chain on Cladograms. The striking feature of these models is that the boundary is not reflecting, and we kill the process once it hits the boundary. We derive the explicit exit distribution from the simplex and probabilistic bounds on the exit time. We also prove that these processes can be viewed as a "stochastic time-reversal" of a Wright-Fisher process of increasing dimensions and conditioned at a random time. A key idea in our proofs is a skew-product construction using certain one-dimensional diffusions called Bessel-square processes of negative dimensions, which have been recently introduced by Going-Jaeschke and Yor.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/11-AOP704 the Annals of Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aop/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Analysis of continuous strict local martingales via h-transforms

We study strict local martingales via h-transforms, a method which first appeared in Delbaen-Schachermayer. We show that strict local martingales arise whenever there is a consistent family of change of measures where the two measures are not equivalent to one another. Several old and new strict local martingales are identified. We treat examples of diffusions with various boundary behavior, size-bias sampling of diffusion paths, and non-colliding diffusions. A multidimensional generalization to conformal strict local martingales is achieved through Kelvin transform. As curious examples of non-standard behavior, we show by various examples that strict local martingales do not behave uniformly when the function (x-K)^+ is applied to them. Implications to the recent literature on financial bubbles are discussed.Comment: Significantly revised version. 28 page