Hello dear r-help group I am turning for you for help with FAQ number 7.31: "Why doesn't R think these numbers are equal?" http://cran.r-project.org/doc/FAQ/R-FAQ.html#Why-doesn_0027t-R-think-these-numbers-are-equal_003f
*My story* is this: I wish to run many lm predictions and need to have them run fast. Using predict.lm is relatively slow, so I tried having it run faster by doing the prediction calculations manually. But doing that gave me problematic results (I won't go into the details of how I found that out). I then discovered that the problem was that the manual calculations I used for the lm predictions yielded different results than that of predict.lm, *here is an example*: predict.lm.diff.from.manual.compute <- function(sample.size = 100) { x <- rnorm(sample.size) y <- x + rnorm(sample.size) new <- data.frame(x = seq(-3, 3, length.out = sample.size)) aa <- lm(y ~ x) predict.lm.result <- sum(predict(aa, new, se.fit = F)) manual.lm.compute.result <- sum(aa$coeff[1]+ new * aa$coeff[2]) # manual.lm.compute.result == predict.lm.result return(all.equal(manual.lm.compute.result , predict.lm.result, tol=0)) } # and here are the results of running the code several times: > predict.lm.diff.from.manual.compute(100) [1] "Mean relative difference: 1.046407e-15" > predict.lm.diff.from.manual.compute(1000) [1] "Mean relative difference: 4.113951e-16" > predict.lm.diff.from.manual.compute(10000) [1] "Mean relative difference: 2.047455e-14" > predict.lm.diff.from.manual.compute(100000) [1] "Mean relative difference: 1.294251e-14" > predict.lm.diff.from.manual.compute(1000000) [1] "Mean relative difference: 5.508314e-13" > And that leaves me with *the question*: Can I reproduce more accurate results from the manual calculations (as the ones I might have gotten from predict.lm) ? Maybe some parameter to increase the precision of the computation ? Many thanks, Tal -- ---------------------------------------------- My contact information: Tal Galili Phone number: 972-50-3373767 FaceBook: Tal Galili My Blogs: http://www.r-statistics.com/ http://www.talgalili.com http://www.biostatistics.co.il [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.