This study is concerned with ensembles of continuous-time Markov chains evolving independently under a common transition rate matrix in some finite state space. In this context, our prior work [Phys. Rev. E 91, 062116 (2015)] has formulated an approximation scheme, called the minimal diffusion formulation, to deduce how the number of chains in a prescribed relevant state evolves in time. The formulation consists of two specifically coupled Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes in a stochastic differential equation representation; it is minimal in the sense that its structure does not change with the state space size or the transition matrix density, and it requires no matrix square-root operations. In the present study, we first calculate the autocorrelation function of the relevant state density in the minimal diffusion formulation, which is fundamental to the identification of the ensemble dynamics. The obtained autocorrelation function is then employed to develop two diffusion formulations that reduce the structural complexity of the minimal diffusion formulation without significant loss of accuracy in the dynamics. One of these variant formulations includes one less noise term than the minimal diffusion formulation and still satisfies the above-mentioned autocorrelation function in its dynamics. The second variant is in the form of a one-dimensional Langevin equation, therefore it is the simplest possible diffusion formulation one can obtain for the problem, yet its autocorrelation function is first-order accurate in time gap. Numerical simulations supporting the theoretical analysis are delivered.

• Received 7 September 2015

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.93.022123