Densities for piecewise deterministic Markov processes with boundary

Abstract

We study the existence of densities for distributions of piecewise deterministic Markov processes. We also obtain relationships between invariant densities of the continuous time process and that of the process observed at jump times. In our approach we use functional-analytic methods and the theory of linear operator semigroups. By imposing general conditions on the characteristics of a given Markov process, we show the existence of a substochastic semigroup describing the evolution of densities for the process and we identify its generator. Our main tool is a new perturbation theorem for substochastic semigroups, where we perturb both the action of the generator and of its domain, allowing to treat general transport-type equations with non-local boundary conditions. A couple of particular examples illustrate our general results.