Generalized mean
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A generalized mean, also known as power mean or Hölder mean, is an abstraction of the Pythagorean means including arithmetic, geometric, and harmonic means.
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[edit] Definition
If p is a non-zero real number, we can define the generalized mean with exponent p of the positive real numbers as
[edit] Properties
- Like most means, the generalized mean is a homogeneous function of its arguments . That is, if b is a positive real number, then the generalized mean with exponent p of the numbers is equal to b times the generalized mean of the numbers .
- Like the quasi-arithmetic means, the computation of the mean can be split into computations of equal sized sub-blocks.
[edit] Generalized mean inequality
In general, if p < q, then and the two means are equal if and only if . This follows from the fact that
which can be proved using Jensen's inequality.
In particular, for , the generalized mean inequality implies the Pythagorean means inequality as well as the inequality of arithmetic and geometric means.
[edit] Special cases
- - minimum,
- - harmonic mean,
- - geometric mean,
- - arithmetic mean,
- - quadratic mean,
- - maximum.
[edit] Proof of power means inequality
[edit] Equivalence of inequalities between means of opposite signs
Suppose an average between power means with exponents p and q holds:
then:
We raise both sides to the power of -1 (strictly decreasing function in positive reals):
We get the inequality for means with exponents -p and -q, and we can use the same reasoning backwards, thus proving the inequalities to be equivalent, which will be used in some of the later proofs.
[edit] Geometric mean
For any q the inequality between mean with exponent q and geometric mean can be transformed in the following way:
(the first inequality is to be proven for positive q, and the latter otherwise)
We raise both sides to the power of q:
in both cases we get the inequality between weighted arithmetic and geometric means for the sequence , which can be proved by Jensen's inequality, making use of the fact the logarithmic function is concave:
By applying (strictly increasing) exp function to both sides we get the inequality:
Thus for any positive q it is true that:
since the inequality holds for any q, however small, and, as will be shown later, the expressions on the left and right approximate the geometric mean better as q approaches 0, the limit of the power mean for q approaching 0 is the geometric mean:
[edit] Inequality between any two power means
We are to prove that for any p<q the following inequality holds:
if p is negative, and q is positive, the inequality is equivalent to the one proved above:
The proof for positive p and q is as follows: Define the following function: . f is a power function, so it does have a second derivative: which is strictly positive within the domain of f, since q > p, so we know f is convex.
Using this, and the Jensen's inequality we get:
after raising both side to the power of 1/q (an increasing function, since 1/q is positive) we get the inequality which was to be proven:
Using the previously shown equivalence we can prove the inequality for negative p and q by substituting them with, respectively, -q and -p, QED.
[edit] Minimum and maximum
Minimum and maximum are assumed to be the power means with exponents of and . Thus for any q:
For maximum the proof is as follows: Assume WLoG that the sequence xi is nonincreasing and no weight is zero.
Then the inequality is equivalent to:
After raising both sides to the power of q we get (depending on the sign of q) one of the inequalities:
≤ for q>0, ≥ for q<0.
After subtracting w1x1 from the both sides we get:
After dividing by (1 − w1):
1 - w1 is nonzero, thus:
Substacting x1q leaves:
which is obvious, since x1 is greater or equal to any xi, and thus:
For minimum the proof is almost the same, only instead of x1, w1 we use xn, wn, QED.
[edit] Generalized f-mean
The power mean could be generalized further to the generalized f-mean:
which covers e.g. the geometric mean without using a limit. The power mean is obtained for .
[edit] Applications
[edit] Signal processing
A power mean serves a non-linear moving average which is shifted towards small signal values for small p and emphasizes big signal values for big p. Given an efficient implementation of a moving arithmetic mean called smooth you can implement a moving power mean according to the following Haskell code.
powerSmooth :: Floating a => ([a] -> [a]) -> a -> [a] -> [a] powerSmooth smooth p = map (** recip p) . smooth . map (**p)
- For big p it can serve an envelope detector on a rectified signal.
- For small p it can serve an baseline detector on a mass spectrum.
[edit] See also
- Inequality of arithmetic and geometric means
- arithmetic mean
- geometric mean
- harmonic mean
- Heronian mean
- Lehmer mean - also a mean related to powers
- average
- root mean square