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Friday, January 24, 2025

Taylor Product?

We learned, so long ago we've probably forgotten when, about the Taylor Series. f(x)=f(x0)+(1/2)(xx0)f(x0)+(1/6)(xx0)2f If the derivatives are large, this might not converge very quickly (if at all). If the function f is reasonably well behaved, and positive, we can try looking at products instead. Never mind the complex logarithms for now. \begin{eqnarray} f(x) = e^{log(f(x))} \\ g(x) \equiv log(f(x)) \\ g(x) = g(x_0) + (x-x_0)g^{'}(x_0) + (1/2)(x-x_0)^2 g^{''}(x_0) + \dots \\ f(x) = f(x_0) e^{(x-x_0)g^{'}(x_0)} e^{(1/2)(x-x_0)^2 g^{''}(x_0)} \dots \end{eqnarray} Will this converge any faster? For a distance use the difference between the approximation so far and the true value, divided by the true value. Pick a couple of simple examples: f(x)= e^{x} and f(x) = x^2. The first one converges much faster with a "Taylor Product" \begin{eqnarray} f(x) = e^x \\ g(x) = x \\ g(x) = x_0 + (x-x_0) 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 \dots \\ f(x) = f(x_0) e^{(x-x_0)} \times 1 \times 1 \dots \end{eqnarray} The "distances" for the approximations are \begin{eqnarray} (f(x)-f(x_0))/f(x) = 1 - e^{x-x0} \\ (f(x)-f(x_0) e^{(x-x_0)})/f(x) = 0 \\ 0 \\ \dots \end{eqnarray} The second function example is, of course, much easier to approximate with a Taylor Series; you only need three terms for it to be exact. \begin{equation} f(x) = x_0^2 + (x-x_0)\times 2x_0 + (1/2) (x-x_0)^2 \times 2 = x^2 \end{equation} But never mind that; let's use the "Taylor Product" anyway. Here g(x) = 2\log(x) If we let x=x_0+1/2, and let x_0 = 1
order g deriv g^{(n)} at x_0=1 scale term f cumulative
at x_0=1 error frac
0 2\log(x) 0 1 .555
1 2/x 2 2.718 -.208
2 -2/x^2 -2 .7788 .059
3 4/x^3 4 1.0869 -.023
4 -12/x^4 -12 .9692 .009
... ... ... ... ...
Suppose instead that x=x_0 + 1/2 but x_0 = 1000. It probably won't surprise you to see that it converges faster, using the given distance measure. \hline
order g deriv g^{(n)} at x_0=1 scale term f cumulative
at x_0=1 error frac
0 2\log(x) 0 1000000 .001
1 2/x .002 1.0010005 -2.5 E-7
2 -2/x^2 -.000002 .999999 8.3 E-11
3 4/x^3 4\times 10^{-9} 1.00000 -3.1 E-14
... ... ... ... ...
I don't know what this is actually called, and search engines turned up reams of irrelevancies. On a related note, MathJax in Blogger doesn't understand tabular mode.

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