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What business cases are there for using Markov chains? I've seen the sort of play area of a markov chain applied to someone's blog to write a fake post. I'd like some practical examples though? E.g. useful in business or prediction of stock market, or the like...
Edit: Thanks to all who gave examples, I upvoted each one as they were all useful.
Edit2: I selected the answer with the most detail as the accepted answer. All answers I upvoted.
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Markov chains are used in ranking of websites in web searches. Markov chains model the probabilities of linking to a list of sites from other sites on that list; a link represents a transition. The Markov chain is analyzed to determine if there is a steady state distribution, or equilibrium, after many transitions.
In economics and finance, they are often used to predict macroeconomic situations like market crashes and cycles between recession and expansion. Other areas of application include predicting asset and option prices, and calculating credit risks.
Predicting traffic flows, communications networks, genetic issues, and queues are examples where Markov chains can be used to model performance. Devising a physical model for these chaotic systems would be impossibly complicated but doing so using Markov chains is quite simple.
A Markov chain is a stochastic model that uses mathematics to predict the probability of a sequence of events occurring based on the most recent event. A common example of a Markov chain in action is the way Google predicts the next word in your sentence based on your previous entry within Gmail.
The obvious one: Google's PageRank.
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Hidden Markov models are based on a Markov chain and extensively used in speech recognition and especially bioinformatics.
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