Distribution of First Passage Times for Lumped States in Markov Chains

First passage time in Markov chains is defined as the first time that a chain passes a specified state or lumped states. This state or lumped states may indicate first passage time of an interesting, rare and amazing event. In this study, obtaining distribution of the first passage time relating to lumped states which are constructed by gathering the states through lumping method for a irreducible Markov chain whose state space is finite was deliberated. Thanks to lumping method the chain's Markov property has been preserved. Another benefit of lumping method in the way of practice is reduction of the state space thanks to gathering states together. As the obtained first passage distributions are continuous, it may be used in many fields such as reliability and risk analysis