Talk:Algorithms for calculating variance: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 19:20, 22 May 2018

Revision as of 21:18, 22 May 2018

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Note how the computed average using float's and method 2 fails to six digits accuracy before even 1 million trials, while method 1 using floats reproduces the double results all the way out to 17 million trials. <span style="font-size: smaller;" class="autosigned">— Preceding [[Wikipedia:Signatures|unsigned]] comment added by [[Special:Contributions/173.219.85.45|173.219.85.45]] ([[User talk:173.219.85.45|talk]]) 19:41, 19 October 2012 (UTC)</span><!-- Template:Unsigned IP --> <!--Autosigned by SineBot-->

:Method 1's sum += sample is exact (with sample values 1 and 0) until it has no effect, so method 1 fails catastrophically after about 18 million. Method 2's average += delta / numtrials is generally imprecise, and you can't expect single precision to be great here for numtrials in 6 or 7 digits, but it's not too far off on average, so even with single floats and these large numbers of samples the estimated variances are not too unreasonable. [[User:Dicklyon|Dicklyon]] ([[User talk:Dicklyon|talk]]) 21:18, 22 May 2018 (UTC)

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