Chebyshev polynomialsThe Chebyshev polynomials are two sequences of polynomials related to the cosine and sine functions, notated as and . They can be defined in several equivalent ways, one of which starts with trigonometric functions: The Chebyshev polynomials of the first kind are defined by Similarly, the Chebyshev polynomials of the second kind are defined by That these expressions define polynomials in may not be obvious at first sight, but follows by rewriting and using de Moivre's formula or by using the angle sum formulas for and repeatedly.
Conditional probability distributionIn probability theory and statistics, given two jointly distributed random variables and , the conditional probability distribution of given is the probability distribution of when is known to be a particular value; in some cases the conditional probabilities may be expressed as functions containing the unspecified value of as a parameter. When both and are categorical variables, a conditional probability table is typically used to represent the conditional probability.
Conditioning (probability)Beliefs depend on the available information. This idea is formalized in probability theory by conditioning. Conditional probabilities, conditional expectations, and conditional probability distributions are treated on three levels: discrete probabilities, probability density functions, and measure theory. Conditioning leads to a non-random result if the condition is completely specified; otherwise, if the condition is left random, the result of conditioning is also random.
Taylor expansions for the moments of functions of random variablesIn 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. Given and , the mean and the variance of , respectively, a Taylor expansion of the expected value of can be found via Since the second term vanishes. Also, is . Therefore, It is possible to generalize this to functions of more than one variable using multivariate Taylor expansions.
Strong operator topologyIn functional analysis, a branch of mathematics, the strong operator topology, often abbreviated SOT, is the locally convex topology on the set of bounded operators on a Hilbert space H induced by the seminorms of the form , as x varies in H. Equivalently, it is the coarsest topology such that, for each fixed x in H, the evaluation map (taking values in H) is continuous in T. The equivalence of these two definitions can be seen by observing that a subbase for both topologies is given by the sets (where T0 is any bounded operator on H, x is any vector and ε is any positive real number).