Word
extrapolation
Phoneticsex·trap·o·la·tion
US/ɛkˌstɹæpəˈɫeɪʃən/
UK/ɛkstɹˈæpəlˈeɪʃən/
Definition
n. guessing or estimating an outcome that lies outside the range of what you have already observed.
n. the mathematical projection or inference of values lying outside the observed range or support of training data based on existing trends.
Examples
“Predicting sales ten years into the future based on last month's numbers is risky extrapolation.”
“Language models excel at in-distribution interpolation but often stumble during length extrapolation on complex math problems.”
“Positional encodings such as RoPE and ALiBi are explicitly engineered to facilitate length extrapolation beyond the pre-training context window.”
Examples
simple
“Predicting sales ten years into the future based on last month's numbers is risky extrapolation.”
contextual
“Language models excel at in-distribution interpolation but often stumble during length extrapolation on complex math problems.”
complex
“Positional encodings such as RoPE and ALiBi are explicitly engineered to facilitate length extrapolation beyond the pre-training context window.”
Real-World Examples
“Extrapolation occurs when a model is used outside the range of conditions represented in the data that fitted or validated it.” “The most expensive mistakes in this field have all been confident extrapolations of a clean-looking curve, and the people paying the gigawatt-scale bills are betting it holds.” “The end result is a visualisation based on real telescope images and data, but with intuition and extrapolation filling in the gaps where the data is lacking.” Etymology
Formed in the 19th century from extra- ('beyond, outside') by analogy with interpolation (from inter-, 'between').
Etymology adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Domains
Scan code
englishreference.com/q/extrapolation