Doing an assignment and got up to this question "Is is sensible to extrapolate the graph back to the moment when the population was zero? Explain" Don't know how to answer it because I do not know what this word means
[Math] what does it mean to extrapolate
terminology
Best Answer
Images are always very easy to understand.
When you have a set of data, you can either interpolate data within those points or extrapolate data that lies beyond. If x in this graph represents time, then predicting any associated y before the first point or after the last point would be extrapolating it.
Mathematically speaking, it's practically the same as interpolation, but since it isn't bounded on both sides by data, it may be less reliable. Although, that does not answer the question of whether it is sensible or not in your particular case.