Question

I have two matrices x and y, both are results from different algorithms/routines that are supposed to calculate the same result. While I know that the isequal() would check if x and y are the same matrix, the entries in those matrices would not be exactly the same (i.e. some entries may be with 5% off in worst case scenario). In this scenario, what would be the best method of comparing them to see if they are close enough to be considered the same result? Thanks in advance for the advices.

Answer 1

Modifying Edric’s solution:

absTol = 1e-3;   % You choose this value to be what you want!
relTol = 0.05;   % This one too!
absError = x(:)-y(:);
relError = absError./x(:);
relError(~isfinite(relError)) = 0;   % Sets Inf and NaN to 0
same = all( (abs(absError) < absTol) & (abs(relError) < relTol) );

The variable same will be false if either the absolute or the relative error of any element is larger than whatever tolerances you choose. Also, if any elements of x happen to be exactly 0, then some of the elements of relError could end up being either infinite or not-a-number, so I used the ISFINITE function to ignore those values by setting them to 0.

I wouldn’t suggest using IMAGESC to compare plots, since 1) the data is scaled when it is displayed, 2) the colormap for the display has a discrete number of color values (which I think is 256 by default, hence lots of rounding), and 3) subtle variations in color may not be all that apparent from visual comparison of two plots.