Thanks Steven for your very interesting post. This was a critical instance from my problem:
>>>from scipy import comb >>> comb(14354,174) inf The scipy.stats.distributions.hypergeom function uses the scipy.comb function, so it returned nan since it tries to divide an infinite. I did not tried to write a self-made function using standard python as I supposed that the scipy functions reached python's limits but I was wrong, what a fool :-) >If you are calculating hundreds of hypergeometric probabilities, 30 >seconds each could be quite painful, but it certainly shows that Python is >capable of doing it without resorting to logarithms which may lose some >significant digits. Although, in fairness, the log function doesn't seem >to lose much accuracy for arguments in the range you are dealing with. Yes I am calculating hundreds of hypergeometric probabilities so I need fast calculations Ale -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
