On quasi-stationary distributions in discrete-time Markov chains with a denumerable infinity of states

Abstract

Distributions appropriate to the description of long-term behaviour within an irreducible class of discrete-time denumerably infinite Markov chains are considered. The first four sections are concerned with general reslts, extending recent work on this subject. In Section 5 these are applied to the branching process, and give refinements of several well-known results. The last section deals with the semi-infinite random walk with an absorbing barrier at the origin.