jab@math.brown.edu wrote:
I understand from https://github.com/cosmologicon/pywat/pull/40#discussion_r219962259 that "to always round up... can theoretically skew the data"
*Very* theoretically. If the number is even a whisker bigger than 2.5 it's going to get rounded up regardless:
round(2.500000000000001) 3
That difference is on the order of the error you expect from representing decimal fractions in binary, so I would be surprised if anyone can actually measure this bias in a real application.
It is a common knowledge that rounding half-to-even is what users want in most cases
I don't think that's common knowledge; seems like citation needed?
It's not common enough for me to have heard of it before. (BTW, how do you provide a citation for "common knowledge"?-) -- Greg