Bernstein duality revisited: frequency-dependent selection, coordinated mutation and opposing environments

Abstract

Population models usually come in pairs; one process describes forward evolution (e.g. type composition) and the other describes backward evolution (e.g. lines of descent). These processes are often linked by a formal relationship known as duality. Ideally, one of the two processes is easier to analyze, and the duality relation is so simple that properties of the more involved process can be inferred from the simpler one. This is the case when the forward process admits a moment dual. Unfortunately, moment duality seems to be the exception rather than the rule. Various approaches have been used to analyze models in the absence of a moment dual, one of them is based on Bernstein duality and another one on Siegmund duality. As a rule of thumb, the first approach seems to work well whenever the ancestral processes are positive recurrent; the second one, in contrast, works well in situations where the ancestral structures can grow to infinity (in size). The second approach was recently used to provide a full characterization of the long-term behavior of a broad class of $\Lambda$-Wright--Fisher processes subject to frequency-dependent selection and opposing environments. In this paper, we use the first approach to complete the picture, i.e. we describe the long-term behavior of a different class of $\Lambda$-Wright--Fisher processes, which covers many of the cases that were not covered by the aforementioned result (the two classes intersect, but none is a proper subset of the other one). Moreover, we extend the notion of Bernstein duality to cases with (single and coordinated) mutations {and environmental selection}, and we use it to show ergodic properties of the process.