Why are we reinventing wheels and giving them bad names<p>This is an exponential moving average aka first order average and has been used for decades. It's introductory material in any DSP class.<p>There are multiple varying derivations of the coefficients that have different meanings, the best one for this example would be as an approximation of an N-point moving average (derivation of that is an exercise to the reader, but it's like five minutes of whiteboarding)