Data-driven memory-dependent abstractions of dynamical systems

We propose a sample-based, sequential method to abstract a (potentially black-box) dynamical system with a sequence of memory-dependent Markov chains of increasing size. We show that this approximation alleviates a correlation bias that has been observed in sample-based abstractions. We further propose a methodology to detect on the fly the memory length resulting in an abstraction with sufficient accuracy. We prove that, under reasonable assumptions, the method converges to a sound abstraction in some precise sense, and we showcase it on two case studies.