Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Monotonic function
Summary
In mathematics, a monotonic function (or monotone function) is a function between ordered sets that preserves or reverses the given order. This concept first arose in calculus, and was later generalized to the more abstract setting of order theory.
In calculus, a function defined on a subset of the real numbers with real values is called monotonic if and only if it is either entirely non-increasing, or entirely non-decreasing. That is, as per Fig. 1, a function that increases monotonically does not exclusively have to increase, it simply must not decrease.
A function is called monotonically increasing (also increasing or non-decreasing) if for all and such that one has , so preserves the order (see Figure 1). Likewise, a function is called monotonically decreasing (also decreasing or non-increasing) if, whenever , then , so it reverses the order (see Figure 2).
If the order in the definition of monotonicity is replaced by the strict order , one obtains a stronger requirement. A function with this property is called strictly increasing (also increasing). Again, by inverting the order symbol, one finds a corresponding concept called strictly decreasing (also decreasing). A function with either property is called strictly monotone. Functions that are strictly monotone are one-to-one (because for not equal to , either or and so, by monotonicity, either or , thus .)
To avoid ambiguity, the terms weakly monotone, weakly increasing and weakly decreasing are often used to refer to non-strict monotonicity.
The terms "non-decreasing" and "non-increasing" should not be confused with the (much weaker) negative qualifications "not decreasing" and "not increasing". For example, the non-monotonic function shown in figure 3 first falls, then rises, then falls again. It is therefore not decreasing and not increasing, but it is neither non-decreasing nor non-increasing.
A function is said to be absolutely monotonic over an interval if the derivatives of all orders of are nonnegative or all nonpositive at all points on the interval.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.