A Power Transform
Machine Learning
2026-03-23 v1 Statistics Theory
Machine Learning
Statistics Theory
Abstract
Power transforms, such as the Box-Cox transform and Tukey's ladder of powers, are a fundamental tool in mathematics and statistics. These transforms are primarily used for normalizing and standardizing datasets, effectively by raising values to a power. In this work I present a novel power transform, and I show that it serves as a unifying framework for wide family of loss functions, kernel functions, probability distributions, bump functions, and neural network activation functions.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2502.10647,
title = {A Power Transform},
author = {Jonathan T. Barron},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.10647},
year = {2026}
}