Immigration fraction among upward steps 2026-10-25
In a positive recurrent birth-death-immigration jump chain, let and count immigration events and upward steps before time . The centered immigration indicators form bounded martingale differences; the strong law for martingales with bounded increments and the countable-state Markov chain ergodic theorem give almost surely. The analogous argument for upward steps gives . Summing detailed balance gives , since every step is upward or downward. Therefore converges to the displayed fraction. For this chain the explicit stationary distribution reduces the fraction to .
Under the specified evolution rule, conditional on the entire history, the next event's probability distribution depends only on the current population size. This is the time-homogeneous Markov property. Birth and immigration both increase the size by one, while death decreases it by one. Writing , the transition probabilities on areand all other entries are zero. In particular and . The row sum is . Every neighboring pair communicates, so this is an irreducible Markov chain, specifically a birth-death-immigration jump chain.