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Autores principales: Gallesco, Christophe, Oliveira, Caio Teodore Genovese Huss, Takahashi, Daniel Yasumasa
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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Acceso en línea:https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06674
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author Gallesco, Christophe
Oliveira, Caio Teodore Genovese Huss
Takahashi, Daniel Yasumasa
author_facet Gallesco, Christophe
Oliveira, Caio Teodore Genovese Huss
Takahashi, Daniel Yasumasa
contents We study the class structure of finite-alphabet Markov chains with arbitrary memory length. To capture the structural constraints induced by prohibited transitions, we introduce the skeleton of a higher-order transition kernel, defined as a reduced set of contexts encoding all essential zero-probability patterns. To each skeleton we associate a binary transition matrix. We show that the communicating class structure of this matrix completely determines the recurrent classes of the original higher-order Markov chain, along with their periods. As a consequence, simple criteria for essential irreducibility and periodicity follow directly from the skeleton, without constructing the full first-order representation on the enlarged state space. From a practical perspective, this approach can yield significant computational gains. An example illustrates how the skeleton may have substantially smaller order than the original chain.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_06674
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Reduction and classification of higher-order Markov chains
Gallesco, Christophe
Oliveira, Caio Teodore Genovese Huss
Takahashi, Daniel Yasumasa
Statistics Theory
Probability
60J10
We study the class structure of finite-alphabet Markov chains with arbitrary memory length. To capture the structural constraints induced by prohibited transitions, we introduce the skeleton of a higher-order transition kernel, defined as a reduced set of contexts encoding all essential zero-probability patterns. To each skeleton we associate a binary transition matrix. We show that the communicating class structure of this matrix completely determines the recurrent classes of the original higher-order Markov chain, along with their periods. As a consequence, simple criteria for essential irreducibility and periodicity follow directly from the skeleton, without constructing the full first-order representation on the enlarged state space. From a practical perspective, this approach can yield significant computational gains. An example illustrates how the skeleton may have substantially smaller order than the original chain.
title Reduction and classification of higher-order Markov chains
topic Statistics Theory
Probability
60J10
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06674