As a recovering statistician, I’ll be the first to tell you that my people are a painfully literal-minded bunch. Where AI folk favor more sci-fi-flavored names, stats folk love things to do exactly what it says on the tin… and nowhere is this attitude more in-your-face than popular metrics MSE and RMSE.
These names are — wait for it — literally the recipe for calculating them, backwards. Like summoning a very tame tiny demon.
How to calculate mean squared error (MSE):