On 3/23/12 12:51 AM, Manfred Nowak wrote:
Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
You may want to also print the mode of the distribution,
nontrivial but informative
In case of this implementation and according to the given link: trivial
and noninformative, because
| For samples, if it is known that they are drawn from a symmetric
| distribution, the sample mean can be used as an estimate of the
| population mode.
and the program computes the variance as if the values of the sample
follow a normal distribution, which is symmetric.
Therefore the mode of the sample is of interest only, when the variance
is calculated wrongly.
Again, benchmarks I've seen are always asymmetric. Not sure why those
shown here are symmetric. The mode should be very close to the minimum
(and in fact I think taking the minimum is a pretty good approximation
of the sought-after time).
Andrei
