Paper 2, Section II,
Part II, 2015
(i) Defne a Poisson process on with rate . Let and be two independent Poisson processes on of rates and respectively. Prove that is also a Poisson process and find its rate.
(ii) Let be a discrete time Markov chain with transition matrix on the finite state space . Find the generator of the continuous time Markov chain in terms of and . Show that if is an invariant distribution for , then it is also invariant for .
Suppose that has an absorbing state . If and are the absorption times for and respectively, write an equation that relates and , where .
[Hint: You may want to prove that if are i.i.d. non-negative random variables with and is an independent non-negative random variable, then