noofVisitsDist: Expected fraction of the first N steps spent in each state

In markovchain: Easy Handling Discrete Time Markov Chains

Expected fraction of the first N steps spent in each state

Description

Given the initial state i, returns for every state j the expected fraction of the first N steps that the DTMC spends in j.

Usage

noofVisitsDist(markovchain,N,state)

Arguments

markovchain	a markovchain-class object
N	number of steps, a positive integer
state	the initial state

Details

The value for state j is

\frac{1}{N}\sum_{k=1}^{N} (P^k)_{ij} = \frac{E[V_j(N)]}{N},

where V_j(N) is the number of visits to j at times 1, \dots, N (the initial state, at time 0, is not counted). The values sum to one, and multiplied by N they give the expected numbers of visits. As N grows they converge to the stationary distribution for an irreducible chain.

Despite the name of the function, and the title of earlier versions of this page, the result is not the joint distribution of the numbers of visits (V_1(N), \dots, V_n(N)), which the package does not compute (see issue #139).

Value

a named numeric vector with one element per state, summing to one.

Author(s)

Vandit Jain

Examples

transMatr<-matrix(c(0.4,0.6,.3,.7),nrow=2,byrow=TRUE)
simpleMc<-new("markovchain", states=c("a","b"),
             transitionMatrix=transMatr, 
             name="simpleMc")   
noofVisitsDist(simpleMc,5,"a")

# expected numbers of visits during the first 5 steps
5 * noofVisitsDist(simpleMc,5,"a")

markovchain documentation built on Oct. 10, 2026, 9:07 a.m.