
11Introduction
approach for modeling HTA problems but their popularity has waned with
recognition of their limitations, particularly in terms of representing time.
The types of models most frequently used in HTA today are those based on
Markov techniques (named after Andrei Markov, a Russian mathematician
who lived from 1856 to 1922). Unlike decision trees, state-transition (Markov)
models allow the designer to express changes over time in the model. Thus,
this technique was proposed for medical decision making as a solution to
the time limitation of decision trees (Beck and Pauker 1983; Sonnenberg and
Beck 1993). In a state-transition model, ...