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From | Maarten buis <maartenbuis@yahoo.co.uk> |
To | statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu |
Subject | RE: RE: st: A bug in egen and gen? |
Date | Sat, 19 Feb 2011 12:08:16 +0000 (GMT) |
--- On Fri, 18/2/11, Liao, Junlin wrote: > If float can indeed do the job with sufficient precision > like everybody who tried to argue for float indicated, then > why Stata performs its calculations with double precision? The reason is that many statistical techniques involve a great many computations, and a small error made many times can easily turn out to become a big error. Ok, you might say, then why don't I prevent a further error by storing my data as a double? The answer is that that way you are not preventing an error: a float will store a variable with much more precision than with which it is measured, so the extra digit you are storing contain exactly 0 information. -- Maarten -------------------------- Maarten L. Buis Institut fuer Soziologie Universitaet Tuebingen Wilhelmstrasse 36 72074 Tuebingen Germany http://www.maartenbuis.nl -------------------------- * * For searches and help try: * http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search * http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq * http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/