practical

Definition

A claim that the method works under real deployment constraints — limited compute, latency budgets, messy data, ordinary engineering effort — rather than only in idealized settings. It usually implies a deliberate concession: optimality, guarantees, or generality has been traded for something that can actually be run. When you see it, look for which assumption was relaxed to buy the practicality.

Explainers using this term

• Kernel Methods and Gaussian Processes — The Champions Before Neural NetsPractical Bayesian Optimization of Machine Learning Algorithms