[dahart]

Oh interesting, I hadn’t thought about it, but why does it seem like poor naming? I believe “filter” is totally standard in signal processing and has been for a long time, and that term does make sense to me in this case because what we’re trying to do is low-pass filter the signal, really. The filtering is achieve through convolution, and to your point I think there might be cases in which referring to the filter function as a basis function occurs.

I would think that conceptually that a basis function is different form a filter function because a basis function is usually about transforming a point in one space to some different space, and basis functions come in a set that’s the size of the dimensionality of the target space. Filters, even if you can think of the function as a sort of basis, aren’t meant for changing spaces or encoding & decoding against a different basis than the signal. Filters transform the signal but keep it in the same space it started from, and the filter is singular and might lose data.

May be better if I just link to what others say about filters than me trying to blabber on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_(signal_processing)