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Random walks, directed cycles, and Markov chains. (English) Zbl 1506.60071

Summary: A Markov chain is a random process which iteratively travels around in its state space with each transition only depending on the current position and not on the past. When the state space is discrete, we can think of a Markov chain as a special type of random walk on a directed graph. Although a Markov chain normally never settles down but keeps moving around, it does usually have a well-defined limiting behavior in a statistical sense. A given finite directed graph can potentially support many different random walks or Markov chains and each one could have one or more invariant (stationary) distributions. In this paper we explore the question of characterizing the set of all possible invariant distributions. The answer turns out to be quite simple and very natural and involves the cycles on the graph.

MSC:

60J10 Markov chains (discrete-time Markov processes on discrete state spaces)
60G50 Sums of independent random variables; random walks
60E07 Infinitely divisible distributions; stable distributions
05C20 Directed graphs (digraphs), tournaments
Full Text: DOI

References:

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