[Python-ideas] Way to check for floating point "closeness"?

[Ron Adam]

On 01/16/2015 09:13 AM, Neil Girdhar wrote:
> Actually, I was wrong about the exponential distribution's KL divergence.
> It's the relative error (b-a)/b  plus another term: log(b/a) — so I guess I
> don't see what relative error means except as a heuristic.

> Anyway, even if your symmetric error makes sense to you, does anyone
> already use it?  If it were up to me, relative error would be b-a/b +
> log(b/a), but since no one uses that, I think it's a bad idea.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approximation_error

In this case, we are only confirming a single value is within an already 
determined range.

In most cases that is enough to confirm the coding of the algorithm is 
correct, where as the more stringent methods you are thinking of is used to 
confirm the behaviour of the algorithm is valid.

Cheers,
    Ron