Logic in Computer Science (LICS 2005)

Paper: Quantitative Analysis of Probabilistic Pushdown Automata: Expectations and Variances (at LICS 2005)

Authors: Javier Esparza Antonin Kucera Richard Mayr

Abstract

Probabilistic pushdown automata (pPDA) have been identified as a natural model for probabilistic programs with recursive procedure calls. Previous works considered the decidability and complexity of the model-checking problem for pPDA and various probabilistic temporal logics. In this paper we concentrate on computing the expected values and variances of various random variables defined over runs of a given probabilistic pushdown automaton. In particular, we show how to compute the expected accumulated reward and the expected gain for certain classes of reward functions. Using these results, we show how to analyze various quantitative properties of pPDA that are not expressible in conventional probabilistic temporal logics.

BibTeX

  @InProceedings{EsparzaKuceraMayr-QuantitativeAnalysi,
    author = 	 {Javier Esparza and Antonin Kucera and Richard Mayr},
    title = 	 {Quantitative Analysis of Probabilistic Pushdown Automata:  Expectations and Variances},
    booktitle =  {Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual IEEE Symp. on Logic in Computer Science, {LICS} 2005},
    year =	 2005,
    editor =	 {Prakash Panangaden},
    month =	 {June}, 
    pages =      {117--126},
    location =   {Chicago, USA}, 
    publisher =	 {IEEE Computer Society Press}
  }