Related papers: Hitting Time Distribution for Skip-Free Markov Cha…

An (upward) skip-free Markov chain with the set of nonnegative integers as state space is a chain for which upward jumps may be only of unit size; there is no restriction on downward jumps. In a 1987 paper, Brown and Shao determined, for an…

Consider a Markov chain with finite state $\{0, 1, ..., d\}$. We give the generation functions (or Laplace transforms) of absorbing (passage) time in the following two situations : (1) the absorbing time of state $d$ when the chain starts…

For a skip-free Markov process on non-negative integers with generator matrix Q, we evaluate the joint Laplace transform of the occupation times before hitting the state n (starting at 0). This Laplace transform has a very straightforward…

The distribution of the "mixing time" or the "time to stationarity" in a discrete time irreducible Markov chain, starting in state i, can be defined as the number of trials to reach a state sampled from the stationary distribution of the…

In this paper, we consider the N-urn Ehrenfest model. By utilizing an auxiliary continuous-time Markov chain, we obtain the explicit formula for the Laplace transform of the hitting time from a single state to a set A of states where A…

Consider a discrete time, ergodic Markov chain with finite state space which is started from stationarity. Fill and Lyzinski (2014) showed that, in some cases, the hitting time for a given state may be represented as a sum of a geometric…

In a recent paper, Shah [arXiv:2502.03073] derived an explicit expression for the distribution of occupancy times for a two-state Markov chain, using a method based on enumerating sample paths. We consider here the more general problem of…

We consider irreducible reversible discrete time Markov chains on a finite state space. Mixing times and hitting times are fundamental parameters of the chain. We relate them by showing that the mixing time of the lazy chain is equivalent…

It is well known that the distributions of hitting times in Markov chains are quite irregular, unless the limit as time tends to infinity is considered. We show that nevertheless for a typical finite irreducible Markov chain and for…

We develop a systematic matrix-analytic approach, based on intertwinings of Markov semigroups, for proving theorems about hitting-time distributions for finite-state Markov chains -- an approach that (sometimes) deepens understanding of the…

We develop some sufficient conditions for the stochastic ordering between hitting times, in a fixed state, for two Markov chains. In particular, we focus attention on the so called \emph{skip-free} case. In the analysis of such a case, we…

Given a discrete source distribution $\mu$ and discrete target distribution $\nu$ on a common finite state space $\mathcal{X}$, we are tasked with transporting $\mu$ to $\nu$ using a given discrete-time Markov chain $X$ with the quickest…

We study the problem of characterizing the expected hitting times for a robust generalization of continuous-time Markov chains. This generalization is based on the theory of imprecise probabilities, and the models with which we work…

We consider finite irreducible Markov chains. It was shown that mean hitting time from one state to another satisfies the triangle inequality. Hence, sum of mean hitting time between couple of states in both directions is a metric on the…

General characterizations of ergodic Markov chains have been developed in considerable detail. In this paper, we study the transience for discrete-time Markov chains on general state spaces, including the geometric transience and algebraic…

Let 0<\alpha<1/2. We show that the mixing time of a continuous-time reversible Markov chain on a finite state space is about as large as the largest expected hitting time of a subset of stationary measure at least \alpha of the state space.…

We consider reversible ergodic Markov chains with finite state space, and we introduce a new notion of quasi-stationary distribution that does not require the presence of any absorbing state. In our setting, the hitting time of the…

Motivated by applications in telecommunications, computer scienceand physics, we consider a discrete-time Markov process withrestart. At each step the process eitherwith a positive probability restarts from a given distribution, orwith the…

A well-known theorem usually attributed to Keilson states that, for an irreducible continuous-time birth-and-death chain on the nonnegative integers and any d, the passage time from state 0 to state d is distributed as a sum of d…

We compute the stationary distribution of a continuous-time Markov chain which is constructed by gluing together two finite, irreducible Markov chains by identifying a pair of states of one chain with a pair of states of the other and…