---
title: "Polyvariance"
chunk: 1/1
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyvariance"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T11:37:24.381372+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

In program analysis, a polyvariant or context-sensitive analysis (as opposed to a monovariant or context-insensitive analysis) analyzes each function multiple times—typically once at each call site—to improve the precision of the analysis. Polyvariance is common in data-flow and pointer analyses.
Forms of polyvariance include:

Call-site sensitivity
The Cartesian product algorithm
Object sensitivity
Type sensitivity
The first two are more often used for dataflow analyses, the latter two are more frequently used for pointer analyses.


== References ==


=== Sources ===
Smaragdakis, Yannis; Balatsouras, George (2015). "Pointer Analysis" (PDF). Foundations and Trends in Programming Languages. 2 (1): 1–69. doi:10.1561/2500000014. Retrieved May 30, 2019.