Discretetime Markov Chains

This new edition of Markov Chains: Models, Algorithms and Applications has been completely reformatted as a text, complete with end-of-chapter exercises, a new focus on management science, new applications of the models, and new examples with applications in financial risk management and modeling of financial data.

The general theory of stochastic processes and the more specialized theory of Markov processes evolved enormously in the second half of the last century. In parallel, the theory of controlled Markov chains (or Markov decision processes) was being pioneered by control engineers and operations researchers. Researchers in Markov processes and controlled Markov chains have been, for a long time, aware of the synergies between these two subject areas.

This book extends the local central limit theorem to Markov chains whose state spaces and transition probabilities are allowed to change in time. Such chains are used to model Markovian systems depending on external time-dependent parameters. The book develops a new general theory of local limit theorems for additive functionals of Markov chains, in the regimes of local, moderate, and large deviations, and provides nearly optimal conditions for the classical expansions, as well as asymptotic corrections when these conditions fail. Applications include local limit theorems for independent but not identically distributed random variables, Markov chains in random environments, and time-dependent perturbations of homogeneous Markov chains.