In mathematics, a Carleman matrix is a matrix used to convert
function composition
In mathematics, function composition is an operation that takes two functions and , and produces a function such that . In this operation, the function is applied to the result of applying the function to . That is, the functions and ...
into
matrix multiplication
In mathematics, particularly in linear algebra, matrix multiplication is a binary operation that produces a matrix from two matrices. For matrix multiplication, the number of columns in the first matrix must be equal to the number of rows in the s ...
. It is often used in iteration theory to find the continuous
iteration of functions which cannot be iterated by
pattern recognition
Pattern recognition is the automated recognition of patterns and regularities in data. It has applications in statistical data analysis, signal processing, image analysis, information retrieval, bioinformatics, data compression, computer graphi ...
alone. Other uses of Carleman matrices occur in the theory of
probability
Probability is the branch of mathematics concerning numerical descriptions of how likely an Event (probability theory), event is to occur, or how likely it is that a proposition is true. The probability of an event is a number between 0 and ...
generating functions, and
Markov chains
A Markov chain or Markov process is a stochastic process, stochastic model describing a sequence of possible events in which the probability of each event depends only on the state attained in the previous event. Informally, this may be thought ...
.
Definition
The Carleman matrix of an infinitely differentiable function
is defined as:
:
so as to satisfy the (
Taylor series
In mathematics, the Taylor series or Taylor expansion of a function is an infinite sum of terms that are expressed in terms of the function's derivatives at a single point. For most common functions, the function and the sum of its Taylor serie ...
) equation:
:
For instance, the computation of
by
:
simply amounts to the dot-product of row 1 of
with a column vector
.
The entries of