Inverse Distance Weighting (IDW) is a type of deterministic method for multivariate interpolation with a known scattered set of points. The assigned values to unknown points are calculated with a weighted average of the values available at the known points.
The name given to this type of methods was motivated by the weighted average applied since it resorts to the inverse of the distance to each known point ("amount of proximity") when assigning weights.
Read more about Inverse Distance Weighting: Definition of The Problem
Famous quotes containing the words inverse and/or distance:
“Yet time and space are but inverse measures of the force of the soul. The spirit sports with time.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Though there were numerous vessels at this great distance in the horizon on every side, yet the vast spaces between them, like the spaces between the stars,—far as they were distant from us, so were they from one another,—nay, some were twice as far from each other as from us,—impressed us with a sense of the immensity of the ocean, the “unfruitful ocean,” as it has been called, and we could see what proportion man and his works bear to the globe.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)