On First-Passage-Time Densities for Certain Symmetric Markov Chains

The spatial symmetry property of truncated birth-death processes studied in Di Crescenzo [6] is extended to a wider family of continuous-time Markov chains. We show that it yields simple expressions for first-passage-time densities and avoiding transition probabilities, and apply it to a bilateral birth-death process with jumps. It is finally proved that this symmetry property is preserved within the family of strongly similar Markov chains.