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A Characterisation of Transient Random Walks on Stochastic Matrices with Dirichlet Distributed Limits

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2016

S. McKinlay*
Affiliation:
University of Melbourne
*
Postal address: Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Melbourne, Parkville 3010, Australia. Email address: s.mckinlay@ms.unimelb.edu.au.
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Abstract

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We characterise the class of distributions of random stochastic matrices X with the property that the products X(n)X(n − 1) · · · X(1) of independent and identically distributed copies X(k) of X converge almost surely as n → ∞ and the limit is Dirichlet distributed. This extends a result by Chamayou and Letac (1994) and is illustrated by several examples that are of interest in applications.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© Applied Probability Trust 

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