normalize

Verb

normalize (third-person singular simple present normalizes, present participle normalizing, simple past and past participle normalized)

1. (transitive) To make normal, to bring into alignment with an established standard.
   • There is little hope that the two countries will normalize relations; their governments seem to hate each other and would just as soon stay on bad terms.
   • Advocacy groups have long known the power of TV plot lines. Back in the 1980s, the Harvard School of Public Health mounted a campaign to normalize the idea of a “designated driver” to reduce drunk driving.2014 March 27, Robin Marantz Henig, “Fictional Plotlines and Real Assisted Suicide”, in The Atlantic
2. (transitive) To consider normal, to treat as standard in the face of older norms.
3. (transitive) To format in a standardized manner, to make consistent.
   • We'll need to normalize these statements before we can compare them.
4. (intransitive) To become normal; to return to a normal state.
5. (transitive) To reduce the variations by excluding irrelevant aspects.
   • After we properly normalize the measurements with respect to age, gender, geography and economic considerations, there remains little evidence of a difference between the two groups.
   • The Dice coefficient normalizes for length by dividing by the total number of non-zero entries. We multiply by 2 so that we get a measure that ranges from 0.0 to 1.0 with 1.0 indicating identical vectors.1991, Christopher D. Manning, Hinrich Schütze, Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, →ISBN, page 299
6. (transitive) To return a set of points (switches) to the normal position.

   Antonyms:

   reverse

7. (intransitive) To return to the normal position from the reverse position.

   Antonyms:

   reverse

8. (transitive) To subject to normalization; to eliminate redundancy in (a model for storing data).
9. (transitive) To anneal (steel) for the purpose of decreasing brittleness and increasing ductility.
   • Charpy impact testing showed that the normalized steel in the tank shell of the punctured chlorine car had a fracture toughness that was significantly greater than the fracture toughness of the non-normalized steels of the catastrophically ruptured tank cars involved in the derailment of a Canadian...2005 November 29, National Transportation Safety Board, “Tank Car Crashworthiness”, in Collision of Norfolk Southern Freight Train 192 With Standing Norfolk Southern Local Train P22 With Subsequent...
10. (transitive) To divide a vector by its magnitude to produce a unit vector.
11. (transitive) To constrain a number's absolute value to be 1 at maximum. More generally, to constrain the magnitude of a mathematical quantity to be 1 at maximum.