On the quasi-ergodicity of absorbing Markov chains with unbounded transition densities, including random logistic maps with escape

Abstract In this paper, we consider absorbing Markov chains $X_n$ admitting a quasi-stationary measure $\mu $ on M where the transition kernel ${\mathcal P}$ admits an eigenfunction $0\leq \eta \in L^1(M,\mu )$ . We find conditions on the transition densities of ${\mathcal P}$ with respect to $\mu $ which ensure that $\eta (x) \mu (\mathrm {d} x)$ is a quasi-ergodic measure for $X_n$ and that the Yaglom limit converges to the quasi-stationary measure $\mu $ -almost surely. We apply this result to the random logistic map $X_{n+1} = \omega _n X_n (1-X_n)$ absorbed at ${\mathbb R} \setminus [0,1],$ where $\omega _n$ is an independent and identically distributed sequence of random variables uniformly distributed in $[a,b],$ for $1\leq a <4$ and $b>4.$