I need to compute the geometric mean of a large set of numbers, whose values are not a priori limited. The naive way would be
double geometric_mean(std::vector<double> const&data) // failure
{
auto product = 1.0;
for(auto x:data) product *= x;
return std::pow(product,1.0/data.size());
}
However, this may well fail because of underflow or overflow in the accumulated product
(note: long double
doesn't really avoid this problem). So, the next option is to sum-up the logarithms:
double geometric_mean(std::vector<double> const&data)
{
auto sumlog = 0.0;
for(auto x:data) sum_log += std::log(x);
return std::exp(sum_log/data.size());
}
This works, but calls std::log()
for every element, which is potentially slow. Can I avoid that? For example by keeping track of (the equivalent of) the exponent and the mantissa of the accumulated product
separately?
The "split exponent and mantissa" solution:
double geometric_mean(std::vector<double> const & data)
{
double m = 1.0;
long long ex = 0;
double invN = 1.0 / data.size();
for (double x : data)
{
int i;
double f1 = std::frexp(x,&i);
m*=f1;
ex+=i;
}
return std::pow( std::numeric_limits<double>::radix,ex * invN) * std::pow(m,invN);
}
If you are concerned that ex
might overflow you can define it as a double instead of a long long
, and multiply by invN
at every step, but you might lose a lot of precision with this approach.
EDIT For large inputs, we can split the computation in several buckets:
double geometric_mean(std::vector<double> const & data)
{
long long ex = 0;
auto do_bucket = [&data,&ex](int first,int last) -> double
{
double ans = 1.0;
for ( ;first != last;++first)
{
int i;
ans *= std::frexp(data[first],&i);
ex+=i;
}
return ans;
};
const int bucket_size = -std::log2( std::numeric_limits<double>::min() );
std::size_t buckets = data.size() / bucket_size;
double invN = 1.0 / data.size();
double m = 1.0;
for (std::size_t i = 0;i < buckets;++i)
m *= std::pow( do_bucket(i * bucket_size,(i+1) * bucket_size),invN );
m*= std::pow( do_bucket( buckets * bucket_size, data.size() ),invN );
return std::pow( std::numeric_limits<double>::radix,ex * invN ) * m;
}