Computation of moments for probabilistic finite-state automata.

The computation of moments of probabilistic finite-state automata (PFA) is researched in this article. First, the computation of moments of the length of the paths is introduced for general PFA, and then, the computation of moments of the number of times that a symbol appears in the strings generated by the PFA is described. These computations require a matrix inversion. Acyclic PFA, such as word graphs, are quite common in many practical applications. Algorithms for the efficient computation of the moments for acyclic PFA are also presented in this paper.