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In
mathematics Mathematics is a field of study that discovers and organizes methods, Mathematical theory, theories and theorems that are developed and Mathematical proof, proved for the needs of empirical sciences and mathematics itself. There are many ar ...
, a function of n variables is symmetric if its value is the same no matter the order of its
arguments An argument is a series of sentences, statements, or propositions some of which are called premises and one is the conclusion. The purpose of an argument is to give reasons for one's conclusion via justification, explanation, and/or persua ...
. For example, a function f\left(x_1,x_2\right) of two arguments is a symmetric function if and only if f\left(x_1,x_2\right) = f\left(x_2,x_1\right) for all x_1 and x_2 such that \left(x_1,x_2\right) and \left(x_2,x_1\right) are in the domain of f. The most commonly encountered symmetric functions are polynomial functions, which are given by the symmetric polynomials. A related notion is alternating polynomials, which change sign under an interchange of variables. Aside from polynomial functions, tensors that act as functions of several vectors can be symmetric, and in fact the space of symmetric k-tensors on a
vector space In mathematics and physics, a vector space (also called a linear space) is a set (mathematics), set whose elements, often called vector (mathematics and physics), ''vectors'', can be added together and multiplied ("scaled") by numbers called sc ...
V is
isomorphic In mathematics, an isomorphism is a structure-preserving mapping or morphism between two structures of the same type that can be reversed by an inverse mapping. Two mathematical structures are isomorphic if an isomorphism exists between the ...
to the space of homogeneous polynomials of degree k on V. Symmetric functions should not be confused with even and odd functions, which have a different sort of symmetry.


Symmetrization

Given any function f in n variables with values in an
abelian group In mathematics, an abelian group, also called a commutative group, is a group in which the result of applying the group operation to two group elements does not depend on the order in which they are written. That is, the group operation is commu ...
, a symmetric function can be constructed by summing values of f over all permutations of the arguments. Similarly, an anti-symmetric function can be constructed by summing over even permutations and subtracting the sum over odd permutations. These operations are of course not invertible, and could well result in a function that is identically zero for nontrivial functions f. The only general case where f can be recovered if both its symmetrization and antisymmetrization are known is when n = 2 and the abelian group admits a division by 2 (inverse of doubling); then f is equal to half the sum of its symmetrization and its antisymmetrization.


Examples


Applications


U-statistics

In
statistics Statistics (from German language, German: ', "description of a State (polity), state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. In applying statistics to a s ...
, an n-sample statistic (a function in n variables) that is obtained by bootstrapping symmetrization of a k-sample statistic, yielding a symmetric function in n variables, is called a
U-statistic In statistical theory, a U-statistic is a class of statistics defined as the average over the application of a given function applied to all tuples of a fixed size. The letter "U" stands for unbiased. In elementary statistics, U-statistics arise ...
. Examples include the sample mean and
sample variance In probability theory and statistics, variance is the expected value of the squared deviation from the mean of a random variable. The standard deviation (SD) is obtained as the square root of the variance. Variance is a measure of dispersion, ...
.


See also

* * * * * * * *


References

* F. N. David, M. G. Kendall & D. E. Barton (1966) ''Symmetric Function and Allied Tables'',
Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press was the university press of the University of Cambridge. Granted a letters patent by King Henry VIII in 1534, it was the oldest university press in the world. Cambridge University Press merged with Cambridge Assessme ...
. * Joseph P. S. Kung,
Gian-Carlo Rota Gian-Carlo Rota (April 27, 1932 – April 18, 1999) was an Italian-American mathematician and philosopher. He spent most of his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked in combinatorics, functional analysis, proba ...
, & Catherine H. Yan (2009) '' Combinatorics: The Rota Way'', §5.1 Symmetric functions, pp 222–5, Cambridge University Press, . {{Tensors Combinatorics Properties of binary operations