Hi Matt,
I am imagining such a library would be greatly useful for numerical
scientists and statisticians for precise computing. Can you give us a toy
example of how it works ?
(Sorry this is my first time posting on the boost mailing list) - Please
forgive me if I have violated any guidelines.
*Rajaditya Mukherjee *
*3rd Year Graduate Student*
Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering
The Ohio State University
Columbus, Ohio
Tel :- +1-(614)-271-4439
email :- rajaditya.mukherjee@gmail.com
AFAICT the only function for calculating arithmetic mean in boost is in the accumulators library and it's not really appropriate for integral types. In practice, properly calculating the mean for a range (especially a range that's only an input range but not a forward range) is surprisingly tricky to do in a way that avoids overflow and provides an exact result. I have a couple of solutions, including one that works for input ranges.
Is this something that people would find useful? Is there a similar algorithm already implemented in boost that I'm not aware of? The approach I've taken yields an exact result as a mixed number and should work without overflow (assuming only that the range's size is able to be represented by its difference type). I believe the implementation that works for input ranges could theoretically be adapted to work with Boost.Accumulators, though I'm admittedly not too familiar with the library.
-- -Matt Calabrese
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