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In probability theory, it is possible to approximate the moments of a function f of a random variable X using Taylor expansions, provided that f is sufficiently differentiable and that the moments of X are finite. A simulation-based alternative to this approximation is the application of Monte Carlo simulations.
In calculus, Taylor's theorem gives an approximation of a -times differentiable function around a given point by a polynomial of degree , called the -th-order Taylor polynomial. For a smooth function , the Taylor polynomial is the truncation at the order k {\textstyle k} of the Taylor series of the function.
That is, the Taylor series diverges at x if the distance between x and b is larger than the radius of convergence. The Taylor series can be used to calculate the value of an entire function at every point, if the value of the function, and of all of its derivatives, are known at a single point. Uses of the Taylor series for analytic functions ...
Any non-linear differentiable function, (,), of two variables, and , can be expanded as + +. If we take the variance on both sides and use the formula [11] for the variance of a linear combination of variables (+) = + + (,), then we obtain | | + | | +, where is the standard deviation of the function , is the standard deviation of , is the standard deviation of and = is the ...
The mean can be estimated using Eq(14) and the variance using Eq(13) or Eq(15). There are situations, however, in which this first-order Taylor series approximation approach is not appropriate – notably if any of the component variables can vanish. Then, a second-order expansion would be useful; see Meyer [17] for the relevant expressions.
When g is applied to a random variable such as the mean, the delta method would tend to work better as the sample size increases, since it would help reduce the variance, and thus the taylor approximation would be applied to a smaller range of the function g at the point of interest.
Many differential equations cannot be solved exactly. For practical purposes, however – such as in engineering – a numeric approximation to the solution is often sufficient. The algorithms studied here can be used to compute such an approximation. An alternative method is to use techniques from calculus to obtain a series expansion of the ...
For the second-order approximations of the third central moment as well as for the derivation of all higher-order approximations see Appendix D of Ref. [3] Taking into account the quadratic terms of the Taylor series and the third moments of the input variables is referred to as second-order third-moment method. [4]