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However, many applications of Markov chains employ finite or countably infinite state spaces, which have a more straightforward statistical analysis. Besides time-index and state-space parameters, there are many other variations, extensions and generalizations (see Variations). For simplicity, most of this article concentrates on the discrete ...
A game of snakes and ladders or any other game whose moves are determined entirely by dice is a Markov chain, indeed, an absorbing Markov chain. This is in contrast to card games such as blackjack, where the cards represent a 'memory' of the past moves. To see the difference, consider the probability for a certain event in the game.
Markov chain Monte Carlo methods that change dimensionality have long been used in statistical physics applications, where for some problems a distribution that is a grand canonical ensemble is used (e.g., when the number of molecules in a box is variable).
In this context, the Markov property indicates that the distribution for this variable depends only on the distribution of a previous state. An example use of a Markov chain is Markov chain Monte Carlo, which uses the Markov property to prove that a particular method for performing a random walk will sample from the joint distribution.
A continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC) is a continuous stochastic process in which, for each state, the process will change state according to an exponential random variable and then move to a different state as specified by the probabilities of a stochastic matrix.
A Markov chain with two states, A and E. In probability, a discrete-time Markov chain (DTMC) is a sequence of random variables, known as a stochastic process, in which the value of the next variable depends only on the value of the current variable, and not any variables in the past.
Intuitively, a stochastic matrix represents a Markov chain; the application of the stochastic matrix to a probability distribution redistributes the probability mass of the original distribution while preserving its total mass. If this process is applied repeatedly, the distribution converges to a stationary distribution for the Markov chain.
Application to time-dilated Markov chains [ edit ] When the stochastic process under consideration is Markovian , the Chapman–Kolmogorov equation is equivalent to an identity on transition densities.