param

Noun

parameter (plural parameters)

1. A value kept constant during an experiment, equation, calculation, or similar, but varied over other versions of the experiment, equation, calculation, etc.
   • As molecular surface-to-surface contacts control both solution phenomena and surface phenomena, it is not surprising that various correlations of cohesion parameters and surface phenomena can be found.2007, Charles M. Hansen, Hansen Solubility Parameters, →ISBN
2. A variable that describes a property or characteristic of some system (material, object, event, etc.) or some aspect thereof.
   • Cohesion parameters (solubility parameters) can be used with full theoretical justification to characterize many surfaces ...2007, Charles M. Hansen, Hansen Solubility Parameters: A User's Handbook, Second Edition, CRC Press, →ISBN, page 113
   1. Any measured quantity of a statistical population that summarises or describes an aspect of the population.
   2. (machine learning) A variable of a model that is trained by a machine learning algorithm.
      • The parameter estimation problem considered in this chapter consists of estimating the unknown parameter, ū [a barred v, actually], given N samples of the observation process.2012, Michael Lemmon, Competitively Inhibited Neural Networks for Adaptive Parameter Estimation, Springer Science & Business Media, →ISBN, page 74
3. An input variable of a function definition, that gets an actual value (argument) at execution time.

   Synonyms:

   formal parameter

4. (broadly) An actual value given to such a formal parameter.

   Synonyms:

   argument, actual parameter

See all 10 meanings of parameter