estimating

Definition

Inferring a quantity you cannot measure directly from the observations you can. Because the output is an estimate rather than the true value, the convention is to report uncertainty alongside it — confidence intervals, error bars, or a stated failure probability — and a point estimate with no such qualifier should be read sceptically. The technical concerns are bias and variance: whether the estimator is systematically off, and how much it moves between samples.

Explainers using this term

• The Mathematics of Diffusion — Generation Seen Through Scores and SDEsGenerative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution