SENSITIVITY, Sebin kumbalath

The word meanings of sensitivity are,

   1 To people's feelings:   the ability to understand other people's feelings: sensitivity to the needs of children. She pointed out with tact and sensitivity exactly where he had gone wrong.

   2 To art/ music/ literature:   the ability to understand art music and literature and to express yourself through them: She played with great sensitivity.

  3 Being easily upset:   a tendency to be easily offended or upset by something: He is a mixture of anger and sensitivity. She was blind to the feelings and sensitivities of other people.

   4 Of in formation/subject:   the fact of needing to be treated very carefully because it may offend or upset people: Confidentiality is important because of the sensitivity of information.

   5 To food/ cold/ light etc:    The quality of reacting quickly or more than usual to something: food sensitivities, allergies and sensitivities, some children develop a sensitivity to cow's milk. The eyes of some fish have a greater sensitivity to light than ours do.

   6 To small changes:   the ability to measure very small changes: the sensitivity of the taste.

A property of a system, or part of a system, that indicates how the system reacts to stimuli. The stimuli can be external (that is, an input signal) or a change in an element in the system. Thus, sensitivity can be interpreted as a measure of the variation in some behavior characteristic of the system that is caused by some change in the original value of one or more of the elements of the system.

Sensitivity is commonly used as a figure of merit for characterizing system performance. As a figure of merit, the sensitivity is a numerical indicator of system performance that is useful for predicting system performance in the presence of elemental variations or comparing the relative performance of two or more systems that ideally have the same performance. In the latter case, the performance of the systems relative to some parameter of interest is rank-ordered by the numerical value of the corresponding sensitivity functions. If T is the performance characteristic and X is the element or a specified input level, then mathematically sensitivity is expressed as a normalized derivative of T with respect to X.