Before revision:  The stationary distributions of CMEs are seldom solvable analytically, and few methods exist that yield numerical estimates with computable error bounds. Here, we present two such methods based on mathematical programming techniques .
After revision:  The stationary distributions of CMEs are seldom solvable analytically, and numerical methods typically produce estimates with uncontrolled errors. To fill this gap, we introduce mathematical programming approaches that yield approximations of these distributions with computable error bounds which enable the verification of their accuracy .