by Joseph Rickert There are number of R packages devoted to sophisticated applications of Markov chains. These include msm and SemiMarkov for fitting multistate models to panel data, mstate for survival analysis applications, TPmsm for estimating transition probabilities for 3-state progressive disease models, heemod for applying Markov models to health care economic applications, HMM and depmixS4 for fitting Hidden Markov Models and mcmc for working with Monte Carlo Markov Chains. All of these assume some considerable knowledge of the underlying theory. To my knowledge only DTMCPack and the relatively recent package, markovchain, were written to facilitate basic computations with Markov...