[R] Peculiarity in non-central qchisq for ncp > 294.92 ...

[Andrew Robinson]

Peter,

I'm sympathetic to the package author.  I'm running some pretty extreme
simulations, and am quite satisfied by artificially constraining the ncp
to be below 294.  This makes my conclusions slightly conservative, but
only very slightly, and the results are very unlikely to change much when
the proper value is used.

I respectfully submit that undocumented shortcomings are bugs.  This one
did me no damage because I was too impatient to wait for the result.
However, had my simulations been much longer term, I would have obtained
very inaccurate results!

I would be more than pleased to draft a note for the help file for this
and any other that you know of.  I'd view that as being higher priority
than fixing it (them).

Best wishes

Andrew

On Mon, 14 Apr 2003, Peter Dalgaard BSA wrote:

> Martin Maechler <maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch> writes:
>
> > which is not really good either:
> >
> >       plot(function(x) pchisq(x, df=1, ncp=295), from=1,to=1e4, log='x')
> >
> > shows the pretty bad behavior (a clear bug).
>
> Well... shortcoming, I'd say. The author of those routines didn't
> expect people to use them with huge noncentralities. I've had this on
> my TODO list for a couple of years by now, ever since fixing the
> similar issue with dchisq--see Rnews 1/1. It looks fairly easy to do
> something along the same lines, but there is now a double recurrence
> relation and it requires a bit of concentration to get the tail bounds
> for the termination criterion.
>
> --
>    O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3
>   c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     2200 Cph. N
>  (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark      Ph: (+45) 35327918
> ~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)             FAX: (+45) 35327907
>

Andrew Robinson			     Ph: 208 885 7115
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No statement above necessarily represents my employer's opinion.