The Markov chain embedding problem in a low jump frequency context

Abstract

We consider the problem of finding the transition rates of a continuous-time homogeneous Markov chain under the empirical condition that the state changes at most once during a time interval of unit length. It is proven that this conditional embedding approach results in a unique intensity matrix for a transition matrix with non-zero diagonal entries. Hence, the presented conditional embedding approach has the merit to avoid the identification phase as well as regularization for the embedding problem. The resulting intensity matrix is compared to the approximation for the Markov generator found by Jarrow.