Independent variable in the context of "Rates of change"

In mathematical systems theory, a multidimensional system or m-D system is a system in which not only one independent variable exists (like time), but there are several independent variables.

Important problems such as factorization and stability of m-D systems (m > 1) have recently attracted the interest of many researchers and practitioners. The reason is that the factorization and stability is not a straightforward extension of the factorization and stability of 1-D systems because, for example, the fundamental theorem of algebra does not exist in the ring of m-D (m > 1) polynomials.

In economics, supply is the amount of a resource that firms, producers, labourers, providers of financial assets, or other economic agents are willing and able to provide to the marketplace or to an individual. Supply can be in produced goods, labour time, raw materials, or any other scarce or valuable object. Supply is often plotted graphically as a supply curve, with the price per unit on the vertical axis and quantity supplied as a function of price on the horizontal axis. This reversal of the usual position of the dependent variable and the independent variable is an unfortunate but standard convention.

The supply curve can be either for an individual seller or for the market as a whole, adding up the quantity supplied by all sellers. The quantity supplied is for a particular time period (e.g., the tons of steel a firm would supply in a year), but the units and time are often omitted in theoretical presentations.

In statistical modeling, regression analysis is a statistical method for estimating the relationship between a dependent variable (often called the outcome or response variable, or a label in machine learning parlance) and one or more independent variables (often called regressors, predictors, covariates, explanatory variables or features).

The most common form of regression analysis is linear regression, in which one finds the line (or a more complex linear combination) that most closely fits the data according to a specific mathematical criterion. For example, the method of ordinary least squares computes the unique line (or hyperplane) that minimizes the sum of squared differences between the true data and that line (or hyperplane). For specific mathematical reasons (see linear regression), this allows the researcher to estimate the conditional expectation (or population average value) of the dependent variable when the independent variables take on a given set of values. Less common forms of regression use slightly different procedures to estimate alternative location parameters (e.g., quantile regression or Necessary Condition Analysis) or estimate the conditional expectation across a broader collection of non-linear models (e.g., nonparametric regression).

In the physical sciences, spectrum describes any continuous range of either frequency or wavelength values. The term initially referred to the range of observed colors as white light is dispersed through a prism — introduced to optics by Isaac Newton in the 17th century.

The concept was later expanded to other waves, such as sound waves and sea waves that also present a variety of frequencies and wavelengths (e.g., noise spectrum, sea wave spectrum). Starting from Fourier analysis, the concept of spectrum expanded to signal theory, where the signal can be graphed as a function of frequency and information can be placed in selected ranges of frequency. Presently, any quantity directly dependent on, and measurable along the range of, a continuous independent variable can be graphed along its range or spectrum. Examples are the range of electron energy in electron spectroscopy or the range of mass-to-charge ratio in mass spectrometry.

In a distribution, full width at half maximum (FWHM) is the difference between the two values of the independent variable at which the dependent variable is equal to half of its maximum value. In other words, it is the width of a spectrum curve measured between those points on the y-axis which are half the maximum amplitude.Half width at half maximum (HWHM) is half of the FWHM if the function is symmetric.The term full duration at half maximum (FDHM) is preferred when the independent variable is time.

FWHM is applied to such phenomena as the duration of pulse waveforms and the spectral width of sources used for optical communications and the resolution of spectrometers.The convention of "width" meaning "half maximum" is also widely used in signal processing to define bandwidth as "width of frequency range where less than half the signal's power is attenuated", i.e., the power is at least half the maximum. In signal processing terms, this is at most −3 dB of attenuation, called half-power point or, more specifically, half-power bandwidth.When half-power point is applied to antenna beam width, it is called half-power beam width.

In mathematics, the limit of a function is a fundamental concept in calculus and analysis concerning the behavior of that function near a particular input which may or may not be in the domain of the function.

Formal definitions, first devised in the early 19th century, are given below. Informally, a function f assigns an output f(x) to every input x. We say that the function has a limit L at an input p, if f(x) gets closer and closer to L as x moves closer and closer to p. More specifically, the output value can be made arbitrarily close to L if the input to f is taken sufficiently close to p. On the other hand, if some inputs very close to p are taken to outputs that stay a fixed distance apart, then we say the limit does not exist.