The use of Markov models in modelling students' flows in a multi‐echelon educational system

In modelling the educational process, discrete‐time Markov chains are commonly used to provide a convenient framework to unify the states of the systems. This paper evaluates the use of discrete‐time Markov chains in modelling the sequence of students' flow in the educational system. The motivations for the study emanate from the frequently observed non‐equidistant transition durations in the educational system and the ill‐posed problem in the discrete‐time Markov chain in an attempt to recover the one‐step transition matrix from the higher‐order transition matrix. The strength and limitations of the existing methods are identified as well as some future research directions.