Harmonic moments of non homogeneous branching processes

We study the harmonic moments of Galton-Watson processes, possibly non homogeneous, with positive values. Good estimates of these are needed to compute unbiased estimators for non canonical branching Markov processes, which occur, for instance, in the modeling of the polymerase chain reaction. By convexity, the ratio of the harmonic mean to the mean is at most 1. We prove that, for every square integrable branching mechanisms, this ratio lies between 1−A/k and 1 − A/k for every initial population of size k > A. The positive constants A and A such that A > A are explicit and depend only on the generation-by-generation branching mechanisms. In particular, we do not use the distribution of the limit of the classical martingale associated to the Galton-Watson process. Thus, emphasis is put on non asymptotic bounds and on the dependence of the harmonic mean upon the size of the initial population. In the Bernoulli case, which is relevant for the modeling of the polymerase chain reaction, we prove essentially optimal bounds that are valid for every initial population k > 1. Finally, in the general case and for large enough initial populations, similar techniques yield sharp estimates of the harmonic moments of higher degrees. Date: February 2, 2008. Abbreviated title: Branching harmonic moments MSC 2000 subject classifications: 60J80.