This could have gone in the Programmer's Symposium as well, but I'll ask here since it is really about the underlying math. For some background, a Markov chain is a sequence of things where the ...

A Markov chain is a sequence of random variables that satisfies P(X t+1 ∣X t ,X t−1 ,…,X 1 )=P(X t+1 ∣X t ). Simply put, it is a sequence in which X t+1 depends only on X t and appears before X t−1 ...

Bayesian statistics have made great strides in recent years, developing a class of methods for estimation and inference via stochastic simulation known as Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. MCMC ...