[Insight-developers] Renaming frenzy

[Stetten]

We've been happy with the word "sample" for individual measurements or
calculations.  It's nice and short and somewhat general.

Paul Hughett wrote:

> Miller, James V (CRD) hath spake unto us, saying:
>
> > I'm assuming that you are saying that it is not a metric in the strict
> > mathematical sense of one-to-one, if a > b, ax > bx, etc....
>
> For the record, a metric on a set X is a function d() from pairs of
> elements of X to non-negative real numbers such that for any x,y,z in
> X:
>
> (1) d(x,y) = d(y,x);
>
> (2) d(x,y) = 0 implies x = y; and
>
> (3) d(x,z) <= d(x,y) + d(y,z).
>
> You can call the function D(x) = d(x,0) a metric without causing me to
> cringe too much, but I won't let you generalize to any measurment.
>
> > I tend to call anything that takes a "measurement" a "metric" (though
> > this is not always appropriate). So a term like Calculator, Estimator,
> > or Measurement is probably more appropriate.
>
> Actually, the term "statistic" is perfectly appropriate, since you can
> consider an image as a member of the population of all images of a
> given size and intensity statistics.  (A statistic is simply some
> function of a random variable.)  Alternatively, you can consider the
> center of gravity and central moments as the mean and covariance matrix
> of the image considered as a probability distribution.
>
> All in all, though, I'm inclined to stick with ImageMomentCalculator;
> calling it a statistic will probably confuse almost as many people as
> calling it a metric.  Image moments are perfectly well defined in
> themselves; the people who really need to know its relationship to
> statistics probably already know it.
>
> Paul Hughett
>
> _______________________________________________
> Insight-developers mailing list
> Insight-developers@public.kitware.com
> http://public.kitware.com/mailman/listinfo/insight-developers