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Is it sufficient to convert a double to a BigDecimal just before addition to retain original precision?

We are solving a numeric precision related bug. Our system collects some numbers and spits their sum.
The issue is that the system does not retain the numeric precision, e.g. 300.7 + 400.9 = 701.599..., while expected result would be 701.6. The precision is supposed to adapt to the input values so we cannot just round results to fixed precision.
The problem is obvious, we use double for the values and addition accumulates the error from the binary representation of the decimal value.
The path of the data is following:
XML file, type xsd:decimal
Parse into a java primitive double. Its 15 decimal places should be enough, we expect values no longer than 10 digits total, 5 fraction digits.
Store into DB MySql 5.5, type double
Load via Hibernate into a JPA entity, i.e. still primitive double
Sum bunch of these values
Print the sum into another XML file
Now, I assume the optimal solution would be converting everything to a decimal format. Unsurprisingly, there is a pressure to go with the cheapest solution. It turns out that converting doubles to BigDecimal just before adding a couple of numbers works in case B in following example:
import java.math.BigDecimal;
public class Arithmetic {
public static void main(String[] args) {
double a = 0.3;
double b = -0.2;
// A
System.out.println(a + b);//0.09999999999999998
// B
System.out.println(BigDecimal.valueOf(a).add(BigDecimal.valueOf(b)));//0.1
// C
System.out.println(new BigDecimal(a).add(new BigDecimal(b)));//0.099999999999999977795539507496869191527366638183593750
}
}
More about this:
Why do we need to convert the double into a string, before we can convert it into a BigDecimal?
Unpredictability of the BigDecimal(double) constructor
I am worried that such a workaround would be a ticking bomb.
First, I am not so sure that this arithmetic is bullet proof for all cases.
Second, there is still some risk that someone in the future might implement some changes and change B to C, because this pitfall is far from obvious and even a unit test may fail to reveal the bug.
I would be willing to live with the second point but the question is: Would this workaround provide correct results? Could there be a case where somehow
Double.valueOf("12345.12345").toString().equals("12345.12345")
is false? Given that Double.toString, according to javadoc, prints just the digits needed to uniquely represent underlying double value, so when parsed again, it gives the same double value? Isn't that sufficient for this use case where I only need to add the numbers and print the sum with this magical Double.toString(Double d) method? To be clear, I do prefer what I consider the clean solution, using BigDecimal everywhere, but I am kind of short of arguments to sell it, by which I mean ideally an example where conversion to BigDecimal before addition fails to do the job described above.

If you can't avoid parsing into primitive double or store as double, you should convert to BigDecimal as early as possible.
double can't exactly represent decimal fractions. The value in double x = 7.3; will never be exactly 7.3, but something very very close to it, with a difference visible from the 16th digit or so on to the right (giving 50 decimal places or so). Don't be mislead by the fact that printing might give exactly "7.3", as printing already does some kind of rounding and doesn't show the number exactly.
If you do lots of computations with double numbers, the tiny differences will eventually sum up until they exceed your tolerance. So using doubles in computations where decimal fractions are needed, is indeed a ticking bomb.
[...] we expect values no longer than 10 digits total, 5 fraction digits.
I read that assertion to mean that all numbers you deal with, are to be exact multiples of 0.00001, without any further digits. You can convert doubles to such BigDecimals with
new BigDecimal.valueOf(Math.round(doubleVal * 100000), 5)
This will give you an exact representation of a number with 5 decimal fraction digits, the 5-fraction-digits one that's closest to the input doubleVal. This way you correct for the tiny differences between the doubleVal and the decimal number that you originally meant.
If you'd simply use BigDecimal.valueOf(double val), you'd go through the string representation of the double you're using, which can't guarantee that it's what you want. It depends on a rounding process inside the Double class which tries to represent the double-approximation of 7.3 (being maybe 7.30000000000000123456789123456789125) with the most plausible number of decimal digits. It happens to result in "7.3" (and, kudos to the developers, quite often matches the "expected" string) and not "7.300000000000001" or "7.3000000000000012" which both seem equally plausible to me.
That's why I recommend not to rely on that rounding, but to do the rounding yourself by decimal shifting 5 places, then rounding to the nearest long, and constructing a BigDecimal scaled back by 5 decimal places. This guarantees that you get an exact value with (at most) 5 fractional decimal places.
Then do your computations with the BigDecimals (using the appropriate MathContext for rounding, if necessary).
When you finally have to store the number as a double, use BigDecimal.doubleValue(). The resulting double will be close enough to the decimal that the above-mentioned conversion will surely give you the same BigDecimal that you had before (unless you have really huge numbers like 10 digits before the decimal point - the you're lost with double anyway).
P.S. Be sure to use BigDecimal only if decimal fractions are relevant to you - there were times when the British Shilling currency consisted of twelve Pence. Representing fractional Pounds as BigDecimal would give a disaster much worse than using doubles.

It depends on the Database you are using. If you are using SQL Server you can use data type as numeric(12, 8) where 12 represent numeric value and 8 represents precision. similarly, for my SQL DECIMAL(5,2) you can use.
You won't lose any precision value if you use the above-mentioned datatype.
Java Hibernate Class :
You can define
private double latitude;
Database:

Why does nextUp method in Math class skips some values?

I was just messing around with this method to see what it does. I created a variable with value 3.14 just because it came to my mind at that instance.
double n = 3.14;
System.out.println(Math.nextUp(n));
The preceding displayed 3.1400000000000006.
Tried with 3.1400000000000001, displayed the same.
Tried with 333.33, displayed 333.33000000000004.
With many other values, it displays the appropriate value for example 73.6 results with 73.60000000000001.
What happens to the values in between 3.1400000000000000 and 3.1400000000000006? Why does it skips some values? I know about the hardware related problems but sometimes it works right. Also even though it is known that precise operations cannot be done, why is such method included in the library? It looks pretty useless due to the fact that it doesn't work always right.

One useful trick in Java is to use the exactness of new BigDecimal(double) and of BigDecimal's toString to show the exact value of a double:
import java.math.BigDecimal;
public class Test {
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println(new BigDecimal(3.14));
System.out.println(new BigDecimal(3.1400000000000001));
System.out.println(new BigDecimal(3.1400000000000006));
}
}
Output:
3.140000000000000124344978758017532527446746826171875
3.140000000000000124344978758017532527446746826171875
3.1400000000000005684341886080801486968994140625
There are a finite number of doubles, so only a specific subset of the real numbers are the exact value of a double. When you create a double literal, the decimal number you type is represented by the nearest of those values. When you output a double, by default, it is shown as the shortest decimal fraction that would round to it on input. You need to do something like the BigDecimal technique I used in the program to see the exact value.
In this case, both 3.14 and 3.1400000000000001 are closer to 3.140000000000000124344978758017532527446746826171875 than to any other double. The next exactly representable number above that is 3.1400000000000005684341886080801486968994140625

Floating point numbers are stored in binary: the decimal representation is just for human consumption.
Using Rick Regan's decimal to floating point converter 3.14 converts to:
11.001000111101011100001010001111010111000010100011111
and 3.1400000000000006 converts to
11.0010001111010111000010100011110101110000101001
which is indeed the next binary number to 53 significant bits.

Like #jgreve mentions this has to do due to the use of float & double primitives types in java, which leads to the so called rounding error. The primitive type int on the other hand is a fixed-point number meaning that it is able to "fit" within 32-bits. Doubles are not fixed-point, meaning that the result of double calculations must often be rounded in order to fit back into its finite representation, which leads sometimes (as presented in your case) to inconsistent values.
See the following two links for more info.
https://stackoverflow.com/a/322875/6012392
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-precision_floating-point_format
A work around could be the following two, which gives a "direction" to the first double.
double n = 1.4;
double x = 1.5;
System.out.println(Math.nextAfter(n, x));
or
double n = 1.4;
double next = n + Math.ulp(n);
System.out.println(next);
But to handle floating point values it is recommended to use the BigDecimal class

Java: convert float to double preserving decimal point precision

I have a float-based storage of decimal by their nature numbers. The precision of float is fine for my needs. Now I want is to perform some more precise calculations with these numbers using double.
An example:
float f = 0.1f;
double d = f; //d = 0.10000000149011612d
// but I want some code that will convert 0.1f to 0.1d;
Update 1:
I know very well that 0.1f != 0.1d. This question is not about precise decimal calculations. Sadly, the question was downvoted. I will try to explain it again...
Let's say I work with an API that returns float numbers for decimal MSFT stock prices. Believe or not, this API exists:
interface Stock {
float[] getDayPrices();
int[] getDayVolumesInHundreds();
}
It is known that the price of a MSFT share is a decimal number with no more than 5 digits, e.g. 31.455, 50.12, 45.888. Obviously the API does not work with BigDecimal because it would be a big overhead for the purpose to just pass the price.
Let's also say I want to calculate a weighted average of these prices with double precision:
float[] prices = msft.getDayPrices();
int[] volumes = msft.getDayVolumesInHundreds();
double priceVolumeSum = 0.0;
long volumeSum = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < prices.length; i++) {
double doublePrice = decimalFloatToDouble(prices[i]);
priceVolumeSum += doublePrice * volumes[i];
volumeSum += volumes[i];
}
System.out.println(priceVolumeSum / volumeSum);
I need a performant implemetation of decimalFloatToDouble.
Now I use the following code, but I need a something more clever:
double decimalFloatToDouble(float f) {
return Double.parseDouble(Float.toString(f));
}

EDIT: this answer corresponds to the question as initially phrased.
When you convert 0.1f to double, you obtain the same number, the imprecise representation of the rational 1/10 (which cannot be represented in binary at any precision) in single-precision. The only thing that changes is the behavior of the printing function. The digits that you see, 0.10000000149011612, were already there in the float variable f. They simply were not printed because these digits aren't printed when printing a float.
Ignore these digits and compute with double as you wish. The problem is not in the conversion, it is in the printing function.

As I understand you, you know that the float is within one float-ulp of an integer number of hundredths, and you know that you're well inside the range where no two integer numbers of hundredths map to the same float. So the information isn't gone at all; you just need to figure out which integer you had.
To get two decimal places, you can multiply by 100, rint/Math.round the result, and multiply by 0.01 to get a close-by double as you wanted. (To get the closest, divide by 100.0 instead.) But I suspect you knew this already and are looking for something that goes a little faster. Try ((9007199254740992 + 100.0 * x) - 9007199254740992) * 0.01 and don't mess with the parentheses. Maybe strictfp that hack for good measure.
You said five significant figures, and apparently your question isn't limited to MSFT share prices. Up until doubles can't represent powers of 10 exactly, this isn't too bad. (And maybe this works beyond that threshold too.) The exponent field of a float narrows down the needed power of ten down to two things, and there are 256 possibilities. (Except in the case of subnormals.) Getting the right power of ten just needs a conditional, and the rounding trick is straightforward enough.
All of this is all going to be a mess, and I'd recommend you stick with the toString approach for all the weird cases.

If your goal is to have a double whose canonical representation will match the canonical representation of a float converting the float to string and converting the result back to double would probably be the most accurate way of achieving that result, at least when it's possible (I don't know for certain whether Java's double-to-string logic would guarantee that there won't be a pair of consecutive double values which report themselves as just above and just-below a number with five significant figures).
If your goal is to round to five significant figures a value which is known to have been rounded to five significant figures while in float form, I would suggest that the simplest approach is probably to simply round to five significant figures. If your magnitude of your numbers will be roughly within the range 1E+/-12, start by finding the smallest power of ten which is smaller than your number, multiply that by 100,000, multiply your number by that, round to the nearest unit, and divide by that power of ten. Because division is often much slower than multiplication, if performance is critical, you might keep a table with powers of ten and their reciprocals. To avoid the possibility of rounding errors, your table should store for each power of then the closest power-of-two double to its reciprocal, and then the closest double to the difference between the first double and the actual reciprocal. Thus, the reciprocal of 100 would be stored as 0.0078125 + 0.0021875; the value n/100 would be computed as n*0.0078125 + n*0.0021875. The first term would never have any round-off error (multiplying by a power of two), and the second value would have precision beyond that needed for the final result, so the final result should thus be rounded accurately.

Java's '==' operator on doubles

This method returns 'true'. Why ?
public static boolean f() {
double val = Double.MAX_VALUE/10;
double save = val;
for (int i = 1; i < 1000; i++) {
val -= i;
}
return (val == save);
}

You're subtracting quite a small value (less than 1000) from a huge value. The small value is so much smaller than the large value that the closest representable value to the theoretical result is still the original value.
Basically it's a result of the way floating point numbers work.
Imagine we had some decimal floating point type (just for simplicity) which only stored 5 significant digits in the mantissa, and an exponent in the range 0 to 1000.
Your example is like writing 10999 - 1000... think about what the result of that would be, when rounded to 5 significant digits. Yes, the exact result is 99999.....9000 (with 999 digits) but if you can only represent values with 5 significant digits, the closest result is 10999 again.

When you set val to Double.MAX_VALUE/10, it is set to a value approximately equal to 1.7976931348623158 * 10^307. substracting values like 1000 from that would required a precision on the double representation that is not possible, so it basically leaves val unchanged.
Depending on your needs, you may use BigDecimal instead of double.

Double.MAX_VALUE is so big that the JVM does not tell the difference between it and Double.MAX_VALUE-1000
if you subtract a number fewer than "1.9958403095347198E292" from Double.MAV_VALUE the result is still Double.MAX_VALUE.
System.out.println(
new BigDecimal(Double.MAX_VALUE).equals( new BigDecimal(
Double.MAX_VALUE - 2.E291) )
);
System.out.println(
new BigDecimal(Double.MAX_VALUE).equals( new BigDecimal(
Double.MAX_VALUE - 2.E292) )
);
Ouptup:
true
false

A double does not have enough precision to perform the calculation you are attempting. So the result is the same as the initial value.
It is nothing to do with the == operator.

val is a big number and when subtracting 1 (or even 1000) from it, the result cannot be expressed properly as a double value. The representation of this number x and x-1 is the same, because double only has a limited number of bits to represent an unlimited number of numbers.

Double.MAX_VALUE is a huge number compared to 1 or 1000. Double.MAX_VALUE-1 is generally equals to Double.MAX_VALUE. So your code roughly does nothing when substracting 1 or 1000 to Double.MAX_VALUE/10.
Always remember that:
doubles or floats are just approximations of real numbers, they are just rationals not equally distributed among the reals
you should use very carefully arithmetic operators between doubles or floats which are not close (there is many other rules such like this...)
in general, never use doubles or float if you need arbitrary precision

Because double is a floating point numeric type, which is a way of approximating numeric values. Floating point representations encode numbers so that we can store numbers much larger or smaller than we normally could. However, not all numbers can be represented in the given space, so multiple numbers get rounded to the same floating point value.
As a simplified example, we might want to be able to store values ranging from -1000 to 1000 in some small amount of space where we would normally only be able to store -10 to 10. So we could round all values to the nearest thousand and store them in the small space: -1000 gets encoded as -10, -900 gets encoded as -9, 1000 gets encoded as 10. But what if we want to store -999? The closest value we can encoded is -1000, so we have to encode -999 as the same value as -1000: -10.
In reality, floating point schemes are much more complicated than the example above, but the concept is similar. Floating point representations of numbers can only represent some of all the possible numbers, so when we have a number that can't be represented as part of the scheme, we have to round it to the closest representable value.
In your code, all values within 1000 of Double.MAX_VALUE / 10 automatically get rounded to Double.MAX_VALUE / 10, which is why the computer thinks (Double.MAX_VALUE / 10) - 1000 == Double.MAX_VALUE / 10.

The result of a floating point calculation is the closest representable value to the exact answer. This program:
public class Test {
public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
double val = Double.MAX_VALUE/10;
System.out.println(val);
System.out.println(Math.nextAfter(val, 0));
}
}
prints:
1.7976931348623158E307
1.7976931348623155E307
The first of these numbers is your original val. The second is the largest double that is less than it.
When you subtract 1000 from 1.7976931348623158E307, the exact answer is between those two numbers, but very, very much closer to 1.7976931348623158E307 than to 1.7976931348623155E307, so the result will be rounded to 1.7976931348623155E307, leaving val unchanged.

Subtraction of numbers double and long

In my JAVA program there is code like this:
int f_part = (int) ((f_num - num) * 100);
f_num is double and num is long. I just want to take the fractional part out and assign it to f_part. But some times f_part value is one less than it's value. Which means if f_num = 123.55 and num = 123, But f_part equals to 54. And it happens only f_num and num is greater than 100. I don't know why this happening. Please can someone explain why this happens and way to correct it.

This is due to the limited precision in doubles.
The root of your problem is that the literal 123.55 actually represents the value 123.54999....
It may seem like it holds the value 123.55 if you print it:
System.out.println(123.55); // prints 123.55
but in fact, the printed value is an approximation. This can be revealed by creating a BigDecimal out of it, (which provides arbitrary precision) and print the BigDecimal:
System.out.println(new BigDecimal(123.55)); // prints 123.54999999999999715...
You can solve it by going via Math.round but you would have to know how many decimals the source double actually entails, or you could choose to go through the string representation of the double in fact goes through a fairly intricate algorithm.
If you're working with currencies, I strongly suggest you either
Let prices etc be represented by BigDecimal which allows you to store numbers as 0.1 accurately, or
Let an int store the number of cents (as opposed to having a double store the number of dollars).
Both ways are perfectly acceptable and used in practice.

From The Floating-Point Guide:
internally, computers use a format (binary floating-point) that cannot
accurately represent a number like 0.1, 0.2 or 0.3 at all.
When the code is compiled or interpreted, your “0.1” is already
rounded to the nearest number in that format, which results in a small
rounding error even before the calculation happens.
It looks like you're calculating money values. double is a completely inappropriate format for this. Use BigDecimal instead.

int f_part = (int) Math.round(((f_num - num) * 100));

This is one of the most often asked (and answered) questions. Floating point arithmetics can not produce exact results, because it's impossible to have an inifinity of real numbers inside 64 bits. Use BigDecimal if you need arbitrary precision.

Floating point arithmetic is not as simple as it may seem and there can be precision issues.
See Why can't decimal numbers be represented exactly in binary?, What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic for details.
If you need absolutely sure precision, you might want to use BigDecimal.