Computing the Stationary Distribution of Absorbing Markov Chains with One Eigenvector of Diagonalizable Transition Matrices

An absorbing Markov chain is an important statistic model and widely used in algorithm modeling for many disciplines, such as digital image processing, network analysis and so on. In order to get the stationary distribution for such model, the inverse of the transition matrix usually needs to be calculated. However, it is still difficult and costly for large matrices. In this paper, for absorbing Markov chains with two absorbing states, we propose a simple method to compute the stationary distribution for models with diagonalizable transition matrices. With this approach, only an eigenvector with eigenvalue 1 needs to be calculated. We also use this method to derive probabilities of the gambler's ruin problem from a matrix perspective. And, it is able to handle expansions of this problem. In fact, this approach is a variant of the general method for absorbing Markov chains. Similar techniques can be used to avoid calculating the inverse matrix in the general method.