On the quasi-ergodic distribution of absorbing Markov processes

Abstract

In this paper, we give a sufficient condition for the existence of a quasi-ergodic distribution for absorbing Markov processes. Using an orthogonal-polynomial approach, we prove that the previous main result is valid for the birth-death process on the nonnegative integers with 0 an absorbing boundary and $\infty$ an entrance boundary. We also show that the quasi-ergodic distribution is stochastically larger than the unique quasi-stationary distribution in the sense of monotone likelihood-ratio ordering for the birth-death process.