On Mar 27, 2008, at 12:43 PM, Ben Webb wrote:
> The existing checks are for analytic derivatives. If you also want to > check numerical derivatives, that would certainly make sense. I assume you mean the existing checks are "analytic checks of derivatives" and "check derivatives numerically", right? How the derivative is evaluated internally doesn't really matter for how we do the checking.
> But to do > this properly requires something like dfridr from Numerical Recipes. I > have not done this so far because the NR license prohibits us from > including this code directly in IMP. The dumb way of checking the derivatives numerically that I submitted does well enough for the functions we have now. If we need something better later we can improve it.
In general, we don't really care that the values of the derivatives are exactly correct as they are just used to approximate the shape of the function, just that they are more or less right.