In many real-life situations, we have the following problem: we want to know the value of some characteristicythat is difficult to measure directly (e.g., lifetime of a pavement, efficiency of an engine, etc.). To estimatey, we must know the relationship betweenyand some directly measurable physical quantitiesx1,...,xn. From this relationship, we extract an algorithmfthat allows us, givenxi, to computey: y=f(x1, ...,xn). So, we measurexi, apply an algorithmf, and get the desired estimate.
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