Question

I’m using the Statistics::Descriptive library in Perl to calculate frequency distributions and coming up against a floating point rounding error problem.

I pass in two values, 0.205 and 0.205, (taken from other numbers and sprintf’d to those) to the stats module and ask it to calculate the frequency distribution but it’s getting stuck in an infinite loop.

Stepping through with a debugger I can see that it’s doing:

my $interval = $self->{sample_range}/$partitions;

my $iter = $self->{min};

while (($iter += $interval) <  $self->{max}) {

  $bins{$iter} = 0;

  push @k, $iter;  ##Keep the "keys" unstringified

}

$self->sample_range (The range is max-min)is returning 2.77555756156289e-17 rather than 0 as I’d expect. This means that the loop ((min+=range) < max)) enters a (for all intents and purposes) infinite loop.

DB<8> print $self->{max};
0.205
DB<9> print $self->{min};
0.205
DB<10> print $self->{max}-$self->{min};
2.77555756156289e-17

So this looks like a rounding problem. I can’t think how to fix this on my side though, and I’m not sure editing the library is a good idea. I’m looking for suggestions of a workaround or alternative.

Cheers,
Neil

Answer 1

I am the Statistics::Descriptive maintainer. Due to its numeric nature, many rounding problems have been reported. I believe this particular one was fixed in a later version to the one you were using that I released recently, by using multiplication for the divisions instead of +=.

Please use the most up-to-date version from the CPAN, and it should be better.