Estimating event probabilities via signal temporal logic and first occurrence distributions

Abstract

Abstract Estimating the probability of events is a significant challenge in many fields, often requiring a probabilistic model or additional labels and tasks for accurate prediction. However, those methods have limited scalability or unnecessary computational resource consumption due to predicting unrelated values. To address these issues, we propose a novel approach that estimates event probabilities based on the distributions of their first occurrence in the time domain. By using Signal Temporal Logic formulas to describe events and applying an algorithm that estimates complex events’ probabilities through simple event occurrence distributions, this study presents an efficient approach that does not depend on high-precision prediction. We evaluate the performance of our method on simulated scenarios of unmanned aerial vehicle motion and autonomous driving.