ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Generalized additive model

A generalized additive model is like a big puzzle with lots of different pieces that fit together to help us understand things better. Imagine you have a big box of different shapes and colors of blocks, and you want to build something really cool. Instead of having just one kind of block, you have lots of different ones that can be put together in different ways.

A generalized additive model works the same way. It uses lots of different pieces of information to try and figure out what's happening with something. For example, let's say we want to figure out why some plants grow bigger than others. We might look at things like how much sunlight they get, how much water they get, and what kind of soil they're planted in. These are all different pieces of information that can help us understand what's happening.

But instead of just looking at each piece of information by itself, we can put them all together in a generalized additive model. This means that we use each piece of information to make a little prediction about how big the plant will be. Then we add all those predictions up to get a final prediction about how big the plant should be based on all the different pieces of information we looked at.

This is kind of like building a big tower out of blocks. Each block represents a different piece of information, and we stack them all together to get our final result. And just like with building blocks, we can keep adding more and more pieces of information to make our predictions more accurate.

Overall, a generalized additive model is like a big puzzle or tower-building game that helps us use lots of different pieces of information to understand something better.