# Create approximations of finite integer sequence

Given a function of real numbers f(x), I can create approximations to arbitrary precision using Taylor polynomials.

Is there something equivalent in the discrete case when I have a sequence of integers that I want to approximate to arbitrary precision.

• Do you know more things about the sequence? Is it bounded? Does it have many instances of the same entry? Is it monotone? Perhaps you can compute some discrete Fourier transform, and use the big coefficientsvsomehow? – Per Alexandersson Jul 21 '18 at 11:37
• Yes, it has many many instances of the same entry. Every value is small. It is not monotone. I would say every value is in the 0-255 range. – IKnowNothing Jul 22 '18 at 0:02
• Do you know the sequence (if so, how do you compute it), or are you looking for a pseudo-random number generator? – Per Alexandersson Jul 22 '18 at 6:38
• There are no random numbers in the sequence. The sequence, due to the size, is not knowable in practice. That is why I am looking to create increasingly better approximations. A good approximation can be used to compute mostly correct values. In theory, the entire sequence could be computed and stored, but there is not enough storage and computing power in the world. – IKnowNothing Jul 23 '18 at 14:13

One often has something similar with sequences. As two examples, there is the one-complexity of an integer which has somewhat erratic behaviour, but has logarithmic lower and upper bounds, and whose value at certain integers is known exactly, and at other integers there are quickly computed approximations with provably small error. Another function is the sequence of prime gaps, which grows less slowly, more erratically, and on which much computation has been done, but approximations are poor still. We can say there are lots of n for which $p_{n+1} - p_n$ is equal to 30, and even have an idea of how many, but we can't tell you which n have that value unless n is less than 10^19, and even then there is the issue of computational energy and retrieval energy involved.