Generaliseerima

Generaliseerima is an Estonian verb meaning to generalize: to derive general conclusions from specific observations, or to extend a statement beyond its original context. In logic, philosophy, and scientific practice, it describes the act of moving from particular cases to broader rules or theories. In statistics and data analysis, generalization refers to a model’s ability to perform well on new data rather than only on the data it was trained on. In everyday language, people generalize when they make broad claims based on a limited set of examples.

The noun form generaliseerimine denotes the act or process of generalizing. The verb follows the standard Estonian pattern with the infinitive suffix -ima; generaliseerima therefore means to generalize, and related forms express tense, aspect, and modality through standard Estonian conjugation.

A common caution in all fields is overgeneralization: drawing a broad conclusion from insufficient or unrepresentative evidence. Conversely, poor generalization can fail to capture genuine regularities in a domain. In empirical research and data analysis, establishing robust generalization typically requires representative samples, replication, and methodological controls. In machine learning, generalization concerns how well a model performs on unseen data and is closely linked to concepts such as overfitting and bias-variance trade-offs.