Related papers: Decisive Markov Chains
Reversibility is a key property of Markov chains, central to algorithms such as Metropolis-Hastings and other MCMC methods. Yet many applications yield non-reversible chains, motivating the problem of approximating them by reversible ones…
In this paper we propose augmented interval Markov chains (AIMCs): a generalisation of the familiar interval Markov chains (IMCs) where uncertain transition probabilities are in addition allowed to depend on one another. This new model…
Density dependent families of Markov chains, such as the stochastic models of mass-action chemical kinetics, converge for large values of the indexing parameter $N$ to deterministic systems of differential equations (Kurtz, 1970). Moreover…
We study black-box testing for stochastic systems and arbitrary $\omega$-regular specifications, explicitly including liveness properties. We are given a finite-state probabilistic system that we can only execute from the initial state. We…
In this paper we investigate the continuum limits of a class of Markov chains. The investigation of such limits is motivated by the desire to model very large networks. We show that under some conditions, a sequence of Markov chains…
Given an infinitesimal perturbation of a discrete-time finite Markov chain, we seek the states that are stable despite the perturbation, \textit{i.e.} the states whose weights in the stationary distributions can be bounded away from $0$ as…
Labeled continuous-time Markov chains (CTMCs) describe processes subject to random timing and partial observability. In applications such as runtime monitoring, we must incorporate past observations. The timing of these observations matters…
Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) are a fundamental model for sequential decision-making under uncertainty. However, many verification and synthesis problems for POMDPs are undecidable or intractable. Most prominently,…
Starting from a Markov chain with a finite alphabet, we consider the chain obtained when all but one symbol are undistinguishable for the practitioner. We study necessary and sufficient conditions for this chain to have continuous…
Scientific explanation often requires inferring maximally predictive features from a given data set. Unfortunately, the collection of minimal maximally predictive features for most stochastic processes is uncountably infinite. In such…
The Transience objective is not to visit any state infinitely often. While this is not possible in finite Markov Decision Process (MDP), it can be satisfied in countably infinite ones, e.g., if the transition graph is acyclic. We prove the…
We propose a new abstract formalism for probabilistic timed systems, Parametric Interval Probabilistic Timed Automata, based on an extension of Parametric Timed Automata and Interval Markov Chains. In this context, we consider the…
The limiting probability distribution is one of the key characteristics of a Markov chain since it shows its long-term behavior. In this paper, for a higher order Markov chain, we establish some properties related to its exact limiting…
We revisit the symbolic verification of Markov chains with respect to finite horizon reachability properties. The prevalent approach iteratively computes step-bounded state reachability probabilities. By contrast, recent advances in…
General Markov chains in an arbitrary phase space are considered in the framework of the operator treatment. Markov operators continue from the space of countably additive measures to the space of finitely additive measures. Cycles of…
Consider an ergodic Markov chain on a countable state space for which the return times have exponential tails. We show that the stationary version of any such chain is a finitary factor of an i.i.d. process. A key step is to show that any…
Cumulative prospect theory (CPT) is the first theory for decision-making under uncertainty that combines full theoretical soundness and empirically realistic features [P.P. Wakker - Prospect theory: For risk and ambiguity, Page 2]. While…
We tackle the problem of deciding whether two probabilistic programs are equivalent in Probabilistic NetKAT, a formal language for specifying and reasoning about the behavior of packet-switched networks. We show that the problem is…
We give polynomial time algorithms for quantitative (and qualitative) reachability analysis for Branching Markov Decision Processes (BMDPs). Specifically, given a BMDP, and given an initial population, where the objective of the controller…
Termination is one of the basic liveness properties, and we study the termination problem for probabilistic programs with real-valued variables. Previous works focused on the qualitative problem that asks whether an input program terminates…