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Markov Chains Explained Visually (2014)

By Victor Powell with text by Lewis Lehe Markov chains, named after Andrey Markov, are mathematical systems that hop from one "state" (a situation or set of values) to another. For example, if you made a Markov chain model of a baby's behavior, you might include "playing," "eating", "sleeping," and "crying" as states, which together with other behaviors could form a 'state space': a list of all possible states.

Thus, a transition matrix comes in handy pretty quickly, unless you want to draw a jungle gym Markov chain diagram. In the hands of metereologists, ecologists, computer scientists, financial engineers and other people who need to model big phenomena, Markov chains can get to be quite large and powerful. For example, the algorithm Google uses to determine the order of search results, called PageRank, is a type of Markov chain.

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