collectivevariable
nounA collective variable is a special number that sums up how a whole group of things is doing.
The scientist used a collective variable to describe how the crowd of molecules moved together.
OTHER MEANINGS
2. In physics and chemistry, a coarse-grained coordinate that captures the slow, important changes of a many-particle system.
The distance between two clusters served as the collective variable in the simulation.
3. In statistics, a combined score built from several individual measurements to represent a group.
Researchers computed a collective variable from the survey answers of all participants.
4. In machine learning, a learned feature that summarizes the joint behavior of many input dimensions.
The network discovered a collective variable that predicted the outcome from all sensor readings.