[R] less precision, please!

Paul MacManus
Fri, 09 Sep 2005 23:41:25 -0000

I need to run qbeta on a set of 500K different parameter pairs (with a fixed
quantile). For most pairs qbeta finds the solution very quickly but for a
substantial minority of the cases qbeta is very slow. This occurs when the
solution is very close to zero. qbeta is getting answers to a precision of about
16 decimal places. I don't need that accuracy. Is there any way to set the
precision of R's calculations to, say, 9 decimal places and so speed up the
whole process?

I could, of course, avoid this problem by not running qbeta when I know the
solution is going to be sufficiently small but I'm more interested in ways
to adjust the precision of calculations in R.

          Thanks, Paul