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Lecture

Markov Chains: Transience & Recurrence

Description

This lecture delves into the concepts of transience and recurrence in Markov chains, focusing on finite Markov chains, communicating classes, birth and death chains, and random walks. The instructor explains the conditions under which a chain is transient or recurrent, providing detailed examples and calculations to illustrate these concepts.

Instructor

Thomas Mountford

D'origine britannique, né en 1961. Il a reçu la bourse présidentielle des jeunes investisseurs (Presidential Young Investigator Grant) en 1990 et le prix de la Fraternité Sloan (Sloan Fellowship) en 1991. Son travail montre que les valeurs critiques d'une classe large de de systèmes de particules proches sont égales à 1, et que, suite à plusieurs travaux sur la trajectoire du mouvement brownien, incluant une simulation numérique, le nombre d'îlots browniens en 2 dimensions tend vers l'infini quand leurs tailles tendent vers 0. Il reçoit le prix Rosenbaum en 1993 lui ouvrant ainsi les portes du Isaac Newton Institute à Cambridge. Il est également décoré par le prix Rollo Davidson en 1995 et nommé membre honoraire de l'Institute of Mathematical Statistics en 2001. Assistant Profeseur de Mathematique a UCLA 1987- 1991 Associate Professeur de Mathematique a UCLA 1991-1993 Professeur de Mathematique a UCLA 1993-2001 Professeur Departement de mathématiques, EPFL dès 2001

Official source

Ontological neighbourhood

Statistics

Statistical inference: Mathematical statistics

Related concepts (32)

Markov chain

A Markov chain or Markov process is a stochastic model describing a sequence of possible events in which the probability of each event depends only on the state attained in the previous event. Informally, this may be thought of as, "What happens next depends only on the state of affairs now." A countably infinite sequence, in which the chain moves state at discrete time steps, gives a discrete-time Markov chain (DTMC). A continuous-time process is called a continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC).

Random variable

A random variable (also called random quantity, aleatory variable, or stochastic variable) is a mathematical formalization of a quantity or object which depends on random events. The term 'random variable' can be misleading as it is not actually random nor a variable, but rather it is a function from possible outcomes (e.g., the possible upper sides of a flipped coin such as heads and tails ) in a sample space (e.g., the set ) to a measurable space (e.g., in which 1 corresponding to and −1 corresponding to ), often to the real numbers.

Independent and identically distributed random variables

In probability theory and statistics, a collection of random variables is independent and identically distributed if each random variable has the same probability distribution as the others and all are mutually independent. This property is usually abbreviated as i.i.d., iid, or IID. IID was first defined in statistics and finds application in different fields such as data mining and signal processing. Statistics commonly deals with random samples. A random sample can be thought of as a set of objects that are chosen randomly.

Exchangeable random variables

In statistics, an exchangeable sequence of random variables (also sometimes interchangeable) is a sequence X1, X2, X3, ... (which may be finitely or infinitely long) whose joint probability distribution does not change when the positions in the sequence in which finitely many of them appear are altered. Thus, for example the sequences both have the same joint probability distribution. It is closely related to the use of independent and identically distributed random variables in statistical models.

Distribution of the product of two random variables

A product distribution is a probability distribution constructed as the distribution of the product of random variables having two other known distributions. Given two statistically independent random variables X and Y, the distribution of the random variable Z that is formed as the product is a product distribution. The product distribution is the PDF of the product of sample values. This is not the same as the product of their PDF's yet the concepts are often ambiguously termed as "product of Gaussians".

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