Journal of Applied Mathematics and Stochastic Analysis
Volume 7 (1994), Issue 3, Pages 357-371
doi:10.1155/S1048953394000304

Regeneration and general Markov chains

Vladimir V. Kalashnikov

Institute of Systems Analysis, 9, Prospect 60 let Oktyabrya, Moscow 117312, Russia

Received 1 January 1994; Revised 1 May 1994

Copyright © 1994 Vladimir V. Kalashnikov. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Ergodicity, continuity, finite approximations and rare visits of general Markov chains are investigated. The obtained results permit further quantitative analysis of characteristics, such as, rates of convergence, continuity (measured as a distance between perturbed and non-perturbed characteristics), deviations between Markov chains, accuracy of approximations and bounds on the distribution function of the first visit time to a chosen subset, etc. The underlying techniques use the embedding of the general Markov chain into a wide sense regenerative process with the help of splitting construction.