ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Discrete-time Fourier transform

The discrete-time Fourier transform is like a magic machine that takes a bunch of numbers and tells you how much each frequency is in those numbers.

It's like listening to music and figuring out what instruments are playing: the DFT hears your numbers and tells you what types of frequencies are in there.

So, let's say you have a song and you want to know what instruments are playing it. You put the song into the DFT machine and it gives you a graph of all the frequencies that are present in the song. You look at the graph and see that there are a lot of high frequencies, which means that there are probably some cymbals or high-pitched notes being played.

The DFT machine is really good at finding patterns in numbers, and it can tell you a lot about the frequencies that are present in your data. It's like a magic wand that helps you understand what's going on in your numbers.