On Jan 15, 2015, at 3:58 PM, Neil Girdhar wrote:
You almost always want to use either an absolute tolerance or a relative
tolerance.
Exactly -- only the user knows what is wanted. The trick is that relative
tolerance is the most-of the time choice for float compares, but it's not
appropriate (or even possible) for zero.
So here we are grappling for a way to have sensible behavior at zero with
otherwise relative tolerance. It's probably not possible to do so in the
general case.
So we should probably simply require the user to specify either and
absolute or relative tolerance and be done with it.
Nothing will be relatively close to zero except zero, which is fine, but
should be mentioned in the docs.
It sounds like this is what Steven's code does. I just haven't figured out
how to look at it on a phone.
-Chris
Here's why: Consider your estimated value a and your actual value b. If
the estimate is taken to be the mean of a standard Gaussian distribution
(the minimum assumptive distribution for a given mean and variance over the
reals), then using an absolute tolerance is equivalent to verifying that
the probability of observing b is within a interval with sufficient
probability. Similarly, if the estimate is taken to be the mean of an
standard exponential distribution (the minimum assumptive distribution for
a given mean over the positive reals), then using a relative tolerance is
equivalent to verifying the same thing.
You almost always want one or the other. The symmetric error that people
are proposing in this thread has no intuitive meaning to me.
Best,
Neil
On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 6:47 PM, Chris Barker - NOAA Federal <
chris.barker@noaa.gov> wrote:
On Jan 15, 2015, at 3:31 PM, Neil Girdhar wrote:
absolute(*a* - *b*) <= (*atol* + *rtol* * absolute(*b*))
Oh, and if the numbers are small, then adding the absolute tolerance
changes the tolerance significantly -- so you don't get what you expect
there, either.
Chris
where atol is an absolute tolerance and rtol is a relative tolerance
(relative to the actual value b). This subsumes most of the proposals here.
adding atol in there "takes care of" the near zero and straddleing zero
issue ( I suspect that's why it's done that way), but it is fatally wrong
for values much less than 1.0 -- the atol totally overwhelms the rtol.
See my post earlier today.
-Chris
--
Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
Oceanographer
Emergency Response Division
NOAA/NOS/OR&R (206) 526-6959 voice
7600 Sand Point Way NE (206) 526-6329 fax
Seattle, WA 98115 (206) 526-6317 main reception
Chris.Barker@noaa.gov