Fix scaling-dependence of termination criterion #47
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The termination criterion for bisecting alpha implicitly assumes the optimal alpha to be in the order of magnitude of
1.0
. For larger values of alpha,lower
andupper
can never get close enough, meaning the bisection never terminates successfully. This happens already with an example like this:For smaller values of alpha, the bisection may terminate much too early, returning a very suboptimal alpha.
This fixes that by checking the relative instead of the absolute difference using
numpy.isclose
. Also, this adds tests with a large and a tiny optimal alpha that would have failed with the previous termination criterion.An alternative might be to check
np.nextafter(lower, upper) == upper
, to ensure finding the exact threshold.See also #18 . A user-defined tolerance as suggested there might be a good future addition. But for now, this change would at least make the function usable for larger alphas.