MOE
Abbreviation with 2 meanings
| Stands for | Margin of error |
|---|---|
| Meanings | 2 |
| Categories | Units & Measurements, Technology & Computing |
| Also written | MoE |
MOE has two meanings. It stands for Margin of error (statistics) or Mixture of experts (artificial intelligence).
Meanings of MOE at a glance
| # | MOE stands for | Context |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Margin of error | Units & Measurements › Statistics |
| 2 | Mixture of experts | Technology & Computing › Artificial Intelligence |
1. Margin of error
Units & Measurements · Statistics Abbreviations · also used in government
Half the width of a confidence interval, usually at 95 percent confidence, reported with opinion polls and surveys. A poll result of 52 percent with a MOE of ±3 points means the true value is likely between 49 and 55 percent.
Example: The survey of 1,012 adults has a MOE of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
For a simple random sample, the 95 percent MOE for a proportion near 50 percent is roughly 1 divided by the square root of the sample size, so 1,000 respondents give about ±3 points. The margin for the gap between two candidates in the same poll is up to twice the stated MOE. It covers only random sampling error, not bias from nonresponse or question wording.
2. Mixture of experts (MoE)
Technology & Computing · Artificial Intelligence Abbreviations
A neural network design in which a router sends each input token to a small subset of specialized subnetworks, called experts, so a model can have a huge total parameter count while using only a fraction of it at each step. Many recent large language models use MoE.
Example: The MoE model has 400 billion parameters but activates only about 17 billion per token.
The idea dates to a 1991 paper by Robert Jacobs, Michael Jordan, Steven Nowlan and Geoffrey Hinton; Google's sparsely gated MoE (2017) and Switch Transformer (2021) scaled it up. Mixtral 8x7B (2023) and DeepSeek's models made it prominent among open-weight models. Balancing load across experts is a key training challenge.
Related abbreviations
More statistics abbreviations
- MCMC – Markov chain Monte Carlo
- Mdn – Median
- MGF – Moment-generating function
- MLE – Maximum likelihood estimation
- MSE – Mean squared error
- n – Sample size
- NPV – Negative predictive value
- OLS – Ordinary least squares
See all 88 statistics abbreviations →