Consistency

Consistency is the property of an estimator tending toward the true parameter value as more data becomes available. This matters because it evaluates not just immediate performance, but whether the method becomes more reliable as sample size increases. In the era of large-scale data, this property becomes especially meaningful, since some methods may look good on small samples but fail to show the expected theoretical behavior at scale. Consistent methods provide stronger long-run statistical foundations. In that sense, consistency is a measure of estimation quality across growing data.