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A formal power series can be loosely thought of as an object that is like a polynomial, but with infinitely many terms.Alternatively, for those familiar with power series (or Taylor series), one may think of a formal power series as a power series in which we ignore questions of convergence by not assuming that the variable X denotes any numerical value (not even an unknown value).
In a formal power series, the powers of the variable are used only as position-holders for the coefficients, so that the coefficient of is the fifth term in the sequence. In combinatorics, the method of generating functions uses formal power series to represent numerical sequences and multisets, for instance allowing concise expressions for ...
Median test (also Mood’s median-test, Westenberg-Mood median test or Brown-Mood median test) is a special case of Pearson's chi-squared test. It is a nonparametric test that tests the null hypothesis that the medians of the populations from which two or more samples are drawn are identical. The data in each sample are assigned to two groups ...
The familiar decimal notation for real numbers can also be viewed as an example of a power series, with integer coefficients, but with the argument x fixed at 1 ⁄ 10. In number theory, the concept of p-adic numbers is also closely related to that of a power series.
The probability generating function is an example of a generating function of a sequence: see also formal power series. It is equivalent to, and sometimes called, the z-transform of the probability mass function.
Unlike an ordinary series, the formal power series is not required to converge: in fact, the generating function is not actually regarded as a function, and the "variable" remains an indeterminate. One can generalize to formal power series in more than one indeterminate, to encode information about infinite multi-dimensional arrays of numbers.
The simplest example is the additive formal group law F(x, y) = x + y. The idea of the definition is that F should be something like the formal power series expansion of the product of a Lie group, where we choose coordinates so that the identity of the Lie group is the origin.
For example, a distribution of points in the plane will typically have a mean and a mode, but the concept of median does not apply. The median makes sense when there is a linear order on the possible values. Generalizations of the concept of median to higher-dimensional spaces are the geometric median and the centerpoint.