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Floating point arithmetic not producing exact results in Java
Floating point inaccuracy examples
In Java, given the following code:
double amount = scan.nextDouble();
tenBills = (int)amount / (int)10;
amount = amount - (tenBills * 10);
fiveBills = (int)amount / (int)5;
amount = amount - (fiveBills * 5);
After the first calculation, given an input of say 16 amount will equal 6.66 . But after the second calculation amount will be 1.6600000000000001 . I don't understand why subtracting an int from a double would cause such a result.
If you want a hardcore explanation, read the classic What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic. It explains why there are inevitably tiny rounding errors in floating point arithmetic like the one you're seeing.
If you just want a summary: Computers represent everything in binary. Binary representations while doing floating point arithmetic results in tiny inaccuracies in some situations.
Subtracting an int from a double does not change only the integer part of the double. It can also change the scale. In your particular case, the integer part before the subtraction (6) requires more bits to represent than the integer part after subtraction (1). This causes the entire representation of the number to allow for more fractional bits. Results can be (as you found out) a bit unexpected. (Pun intended)
Related
This question already has answers here:
Java float 123.129456 to 123.12 without rounding
(5 answers)
How to round a number to n decimal places in Java
(39 answers)
Closed 5 years ago.
Can I reduce the precision of a float number?
In all the searching I've been doing I saw only how to reduce the precision for printing the number. I do not need to print it.
I want, for example, to convert 13.2836 to 13.28. Without even rounding it.
Is it possible?
The suggested answer from the system is not what I am looking for. It also deals with printing the value and I want to have a float.
There isn't really a way to do it, with good reason. While john16384's answer alludes to this, his answer doesn't make the problem clear... so probably you'll try it, it won't do what you want, and perhaps you still won't know why...
The problem is that while we think in decimal and expect that the decimal point is controlled by a power-of-10 exponent, typical floating point implementations (including Java float) use a power-of-2 exponent. Why does it matter?
You know that to represent 1/3 in decimal you'd say 0.3(repeating) - so if you have a limited number of decimal digits, you can't really represent 1/3. When the exponent is 2 instead of 10, you can't really represent 1/5 either, or a lot of other numbers that you could represent exactly in decimal.
As it happens .28 is one of those numbers. So you could multiply by 100, pass the result to floor, and divide by 100, but when this gets converted back to a float, the resulting value will be a little different from .28 and so, if you then check its value, you'll still see more than 2 decimal places.
The solution would be to use something like BigDecimal that can exactly represent decimal values of a given precision.
The standard warnings about doing precision arithmetic with floats applies, but you can do this:
float f = 13.2836;
f = Math.floor(f * 100) / 100;
if you need to save memory in some part of your calculation, And your numbers are smaller than 2^15/100 (range short), you can do the following.
Part of this taken from this post https://stackoverflow.com/a/25201407/7256243.
float number = 1.2345667f;
number= (short)(100*number);
number=(float)(number/100);
You only need to rememeber that the short's are 100 times larger.
Most answers went straight to how do represent floats more accurately, which is strange because you're asking:
Can I reduce the precision of a float number
Which is the exact opposite. So I'll try to answer this.
However there are several way to "reduce precision":
Reduce precision to gain performance
Reduce memory footprint
Round / floor arbitrarily
Make the number more "fuzzy"
Reduce the number of digits after the coma
I'll tackle those separately.
Reduce precision to gain performance
Just to get it out of the way: simply because you're dropping precision off of your calculations on a float, doesn't mean it'll be any faster. Quite the contrary. This answer by #john16384:
f = Math.floor(f * 100) / 100;
Only adds up computation time. If you know the number of significant digits from the result is low, don't bother removing them, just carry that information with the number:
public class Number WithSignificantDigits {
private float value;
private int significantdigits;
(implement basic operations here, but don't floor/round anywhere)
}
If you're doing this because you're worried about performance: stop it now, just use the full precision. If not, read on.
Reduce memory footprint
To actually store a number with less precision, you need to move away from float.
One such representation is using an int with a fixed point convention (i.e. the last 2 digits are past the coma).
If you're trying to save on storage space, do this. If not, read on.
Round / floor arbitrarily
To keep using float, but drop its precision, several options exist:
#john16384 proposed:
`f = Math.floor(f * 100) / 100;`
Or even
f = ((int) (f*100)) / 100.;
If the answer is this, your question is a duplicate. If not, read on.
Make the number more "fuzzy"
Since you just want to lose precision, but haven't stated how much, you could do with bitwise shifts:
float v = 0;
int bits = Float.floatToIntBits(v);
bits = bits >> 7; // Precision lost here
float truncated = Float.intBitsToFloat(bits);
Use 7 bitshifts to reduce precision to nearest 1/128th (close enough to 1/100)
Use 10 bitshifts to reduce precision to nearest 1/1024th (close enough to 1/1000)
I haven't tested performance of those, but If your read this, you did not care.
If you want to lose precision, and you don't care about formatting (numbers may stil have a large number of digits after the coma, like 0,9765625 instead of 1), do this. If you care about formatting and want a limited number of digits after the coma, read on.
Reduce the number of digits after the coma
For this you can:
Follow #Mark Adelsberger's suggestion of BigDecimals, or
Store as a String (yuk)
Because floats or doubles won't let you do this in most cases.
I understand that due to the nature of a float/double one should not use them for precision important calculations. However, i'm a little confused on their limitations due to mixed answers on similar questions, whether or not floats and doubles will always be inaccurate regardless of significant digits or are only inaccurate up to the 16th digit.
I've ran a few examples in Java,
System.out.println(Double.parseDouble("999999.9999999999");
// this outputs correctly w/ 16 digits
System.out.println(Double.parseDouble("9.99999999999999");
// This also outputs correctly w/ 15 digits
System.out.println(Double.parseDouble("9.999999999999999");
// But this doesn't output correctly w/ 16 digits. Outputs 9.999999999999998
I can't find the link to another answer that stated that values like 1.98 and 2.02 would round down to 2.0 and therefore create inaccuracies but testing shows that the values are printed correctly. So my first question is whether or not floating/double values will always be inaccurate or is there a lower limit where you can be assured of precision.
My second question is in regards to using BigDecimal. I know that I should be using BigDecimal for precision important calculations. Therefore I should be using BigDecimal's methods for arithmetic and comparing. However, BigDecimal also includes a doubleValue() method which will convert the BigDecimal to a double. Would it be safe for me to do a comparison between double values that I know for sure have less than 16 digits? There will be no arithmetic done on them at all so the inherent values should not have changed.
For example, is it safe for me to do the following?
BigDecimal myDecimal = new BigDecimal("123.456");
BigDecimal myDecimal2 = new BigDecimal("234.567");
if (myDecimal.doubleValue() < myDecimal2.doubleValue()) System.out.println("myDecimal is smaller than myDecimal2");
Edit: After reading some of the responses to my own answer i've realized my understanding was incorrect and have deleted it. Here are some snippets from it that might help in the future.
"A double cannot hold 0.1 precisely. The closest representable value to 0.1 is 0.1000000000000000055511151231257827021181583404541015625. Java Double.toString only prints enough digits to uniquely identify the double, not the exact value." - Patricia Shanahan
Sources:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/5749978 - States that a double can hold up to 15 digits
I suggest you read this page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-precision_floating-point_format
Once you've read and understood it, and perhaps converted several examples to their binary representations in the 64 bit floating point format, then you'll have a much better idea of what significant digits a Double can hold.
As a side note, (perhaps trivial) a nice and reliable way to store a known precision of value is to simply multiply it by the relevant factor and store as some integral type, which are completely precise.
For example:
double costInPounds = <something>; //e.g. 3.587
int costInPence = (int)(costInPounds * 100 + 0.5); //359
Plainly some precision can be lost, but if a required/desired precision is known, this can save a lot of bother with floating point values, and once this has been done, no precision can be lost by further manipulations.
The + 0.5 is to ensure that rounding works as expected. (int) takes the 'floor' of the provided double value, so adding 0.5 makes it round up and down as expected.
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Is floating point math broken?
(31 answers)
Closed 8 years ago.
double test = 1029 / 9.8; // = 104.99999...
int inttest1 = (int) test; // 104
int inttest2 = (int)Math.floor(test); // 104
double testtt = 9.8 * 105; // 1029.0
1029 / 9.8 equals 105
but Java returns 104.9999...
More serious problem is integer casing result is 104, not 105
Why this happens and how can I avoid this result?
There are an infinite number of numbers, even in the limited range represented by Java. That's because mathematically, if you give me any two distinct numbers, I can average them to get a number between them. No matter how close they are.
And there are only a limited number of bits available to represent those numbers.
Hence, something has to give. What gives is the precision of the numbers. Not all numbers can be represented exactly, so some (the vast majority actually) are approximations.
For example, 0.1 cannot be represented exactly with IEEE754 encoding, even with a billion bits available to you.
See this answer for more information on the inherent imprecision of limited-storage floating point numbers.
Casting to an int implicitly drops any decimal. No need to call Math.floor() (assuming positive numbers)
To avoid this behavior use BigDecimal;
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/math/BigDecimal.html
Standard floating point variables are in binary floating point. Many decimal floating point values (which are the ones you type in your code) have no exact representation in binary floating point. So it isn't doing the calculation with the exact numbers you entered but with some values very close to it. You can use Math.round to round the result to the precision you need and most likely the small error will disappear.
If you really need exact decimal calculation use BigDecimal but note that it is much slower.
This question already has answers here:
Closed 10 years ago.
Possible Duplicate:
Retain precision with Doubles in java
Alright so I've got the following chunk of code:
int rotation = e.getWheelRotation();
if(rotation < 0)
zoom(zoom + rotation * -.05);
else if(zoom - .05 > 0)
zoom(zoom - rotation * .05);
System.out.println(zoom);
Now, the zoom variable is of type double, initially set to 1. So, I would expect the results to be like 1 - .05 = .95; .95 - .05 = .9; .9 - .05 = .85; etc. This appears to be not the case though when I print the result as you can see below:
0.95
0.8999999999999999
0.8499999999999999
0.7999999999999998
0.7499999999999998
0.6999999999999997
Hopefully someone is able to clearly explain. I searched the internet and I read it has something to do with some limitations when we're storing floats in binary but I still don't quite understand. A solution to my problem is not shockingly important but I would like to understand this kind of behavior.
Java uses IEEE-754 floating point numbers. They're not perfectly precise. The famous example is:
System.out.println(0.1d + 0.2d);
...which outputs 0.30000000000000004.
What you're seeing is just a symptom of that imprecision. You can improve the precision by using double rather than float.
If you're dealing with financial calculations, you might prefer BigDecimal to float or double.
float and double have limited precision because its fractional part is represented as a series of powers of 2 e.g. 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 ... If you have an number like 1/10 it has to be approximated.
For this reason, whenever you deal with floating point you must use reasonable rounding or you can see small errors.
e.g.
System.out.printf("%.2f%n", zoom);
To minimise round errors, you could count the number of rotations instead and divide this int value by 20.0. You won't see a rounding error this way, and it will be faster, with less magic numbers.
float and double have precision issues. I would recommend you take a look at the BigDecimal Class. That should take care of precision issues.
Since decimal numbers (and integer numbers as well) can have an infinite number of possible values, they are impossible to map precisely to bits using a standard format. Computers circumvent this problem by limiting the range the numbers can assume.
For example, an int in java can represent nothing larger then Integer.MAX_VALUE or 2^31 - 1.
For decimal numbers, there is also a problem with the numbers after the comma, which also might be infinite. This is solved by not allowing all decimal values, but limiting to a (smartly chosen) number of possibilities, based on powers of 2. This happens automatically but is often nothing to worry about, you can interpret your result of 0.899999 as 0.9. In case you do need explicit precision, you will have to resort to other data types, which might have other limitations.
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Closed 11 years ago.
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How to round a number to n decimal places in Java
When multiplying two numbers in java happens this:
double a = 9.495 * 100;
Expected result:
a = 949.5;
But the obtained result is:
a = 949.4999999999999
When I try to round number 9.495 in two decimal places the result is 9.49 instead of 9.50
Any ideas how to solve this problem?
If you want accurate floating point computations, do not use the float or double types, but rather make use of the BigDecimal class.
This is a side effect of floating point calculations, and is well understood, but not necessarily intuitive. This question has actually been asked literally thousands of times, and you need to study how floating point arithmetic works.
To get around this, if you only need 2-decimal precision, then use a integer instead.
For example, if you're dealing with currency, and you want to buy a 100 items for $4.95, then you represent the cost of that value as the integer "495", an multiply that by 100, which gives you "49500". You always treat the last two digits as cents, so "49500" is $495.00.
You cannot. Floating point and double precision numbers in a computer cannot represent all possible values.