[SciPy-user] Numerical stability and Legendre polynomials
Yaroslav Bulatov
yaroslavvb at gmail.com
Fri Sep 9 14:29:18 EDT 2005
Thanks for the insight.
The 3-term recursion indeed does much better.
I did some experiments to measure exactly how much better.
Here's the graph of the number of bits needed to represent maximum
error when you project f(x)=0.5 onto Legendre polynomial basis.
http://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~bulatov/research/reports/iet/legendre/numerical-error.png
Green graph is the old method using scipy's functions, and blue graph
uses 3-term recursion
And here's just the graph of 3-term's recursion until 250'th order
http://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~bulatov/research/reports/iet/legendre/numerical-error2.png
For some reason the error explodes around 210th order
Here's the code used to generate error values
k = 30
vals = zeros(200, Float)
errors = zeros(k, Float)
for j in range(k):
ff = lambda x: eval_poly_3term(j, x)
coef = (2.*j+1)/2*(integrate.quad(ff, -1, 1))[0]
vals+=coef*eval_poly_3term(j, arange(-1,1,0.01))
errors[j] = log(max(max(abs(vals-1)),2**-53))/log(2)+53
> In [33]: for n in range(30):
> ....: pn = scipy.special.legendre(n)
> ....: print pn(-1.0)-((-1)**n)*pn(1.0)
> ....:
> 0.0
> 0.0
> 0.0
> 0.0
> -1.11022302463e-15
For some reason when I execute the same code I get
0.0
0.0
0.0
8.881784197e-016
-3.10862446895e-015
I'm using 64 bit arithmetic (floats), scipy version 0.3.2, why do you
get higher accuracy?
--
Yaroslav Bulatov
bulatov at cs.oregonstate.edu
Dearborn 102
Oregon State University
Corvallis, OR
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