## Friday, 18 August 2017

### The Final Polish

We are preparing for releasing version 3.0.0 of the interval package and this last week have mainly been about fixing minor bugs related to the release. I mention two of the more interesting bugs here.

### Compact Format

We (Oliver) recently added support for "format compact" when printing intervals. It turns out that the way to determine if compact format is enabled differs very much between different version of Octave. There are at least three different ways to get the information.

In the older releases (< 4.2.0 I believe) you use "get (0, "FormatSpacing")" but there appear to be a bug for version < 4.0.0 for which this always return "loose".

For the current tip of the development branch you can use "[~, spacing] = format ()" to get the spacing.

Finally in between these two version you use "__compactformat__ ()".

In the end Oliver, probably, found a way to handle this mess and compact format should now be fully supported for intervals. The function to do this is available here https://sourceforge.net/p/octave/interval/ci/default/tree/inst/@infsup/private/__loosespacing__.m.

### Dot-product of Empty Matrices

When updating "dot" to support N-dimensional arrays I also modified it so that it behaves similar to Octaves standard implementation. The difference is in how it handles empty input. Previously we had

> x = infsupdec (ones (0, 2));
> dot (x, x)
ans = 0×2 interval matrix

but with the new version we get

> dot (x, x)
ans = 1×2 interval vector
[0]_com   [0]_com

which is consistent with the standard implementation.

In the function we use "min" to compute the decoration for the result. Normally "min (x)" and "dot (x, x)" returns results of the same size (the dimension along which it is computed is set to 1), but they handle empty input differently. We have

> x = ones (0, 2);
> dot (x, x)
ans =
0   0
> min (x)
ans = [](0x2)

This meant that the decoration would be incorrect since the implementation assumed they always had the same size. Fortunately the solution was very simple. If the dimension along which we are computing the dot-product is zero. the decoration should always be "com". So just adding a check for that was enough.

You could argue that "min (ones (0, 2))" should return "[inf, inf]" similarly to how many of the other reductions, like "sum" or "prod", return their unit for empty input. But this would most likely be very confusing for a lot of people. And it is not compatible with how Matlab does it either.

## Updates on the Taylor Package

I have also had some time to work on the Taylor package this week. The basic utility functions are now completed and I have started to work on functions for actually computing with Taylor expansions. At the moment there are only a limited amount of functions implemented. For example we can calculate the Taylor expansion of order 4 for the functions $\frac{e^x + \log(x)}{1 + x}$ at $x = 5$.

## Create a variable of degree 4 and with value 5
> x = taylor (infsupdec (5), 4)
x = [5]_com + [1]_com X + [0]_com X^2 + [0]_com X^3 + [0]_com X^4

## Calculate the function
> (exp (x) + log (x))./(1 + x)
ans = [25.003, 25.004]_com + [20.601, 20.602]_com X + [8.9308, 8.9309]_com X^2 + [2.6345, 2.6346]_com X^3 + [0.59148, 0.59149]_com X^4

## Friday, 11 August 2017

### Improving the Automatic Tests

Oliver and I have been working on improving the test framework used for the interval package. The package shares a large number of tests with other interval packages through an interval test framework that Oliver created. Here is the repository.

## Creating the Tests

Previously these tests were separated from the rest of the package and you usually ran them with help of the Makefile. Now Oliver has moved them to the m-files and you can run them, together with the other tests for the function, with test @infsup/function in Octave. This makes it much easier to test the functions directly.

In addition to making the tests easier to use we also wanted to extend them to not only test scalar evaluation but also vector evaluation. The test data, input ad expected output, is stored in a cell array and when performing the scalar testing we simply loop over that cell and run the function for each element. The actual code looks like this (in this case for plus)

%!test
%! # Scalar evaluation
%! for testcase = [testcases]'
%!   assert (isequaln (...
%!     plus (testcase.in{1}, testcase.in{2}), ...
%!     testcase.out));
%! endfor

For testing the vector evaluation we simply concatenate the cell array into a vector and give that to the function. Here is what that code looks like

%! # Vector evaluation
%! in1 = vertcat (vertcat (testcases.in){:, 1});
%! in2 = vertcat (vertcat (testcases.in){:, 2});
%! out = vertcat (testcases.out);
%! assert (isequaln (plus (in1, in2), out));

Lastly we also wanted to test evaluation of N-dimensional arrays. This is done by concatenating the data into a vector and then reshape that vector into an N-dimensional array. But what size should we use for the array? Well, we want to have at least three dimensions because otherwise we are not really testing N-dimensional arrays. My solution was to completely factor the length of the vector and use that as size, testsize = factor (length (in1)), and if the length of the vector has two or fewer factors we add a few elements to the end until we get at least three factors. This is the code for that

%!test
%! # N-dimensional array evaluation
%! in1 = vertcat (vertcat (testcases.in){:, 1});
%! in2 = vertcat (vertcat (testcases.in){:, 2});
%! out = vertcat (testcases.out);
%! # Reshape data
%! i = -1;
%! do
%!   i = i + 1;
%!   testsize = factor (numel (in1) + i);
%! until (numel (testsize) > 2)
%! in1 = reshape ([in1; in1(1:i)], testsize);
%! in2 = reshape ([in2; in2(1:i)], testsize);
%! out = reshape ([out; out(1:i)], testsize);
%! assert (isequaln (plus (in1, in2), out));

This works very well, except when the number of test cases is to small. If the number of test is less than four this will fail. But there are only a handful of functions with that few tests so I fixed those independently.

## Running the tests

Okay, so we have created a bunch of new tests for the package. Do we actually find any new bugs with them? Yes!

The function pow.m failed on the vector test. The problem? In one place $\&\&$ was used instead of $\&$. For scalar input I believe these behave the same but they differ for vector input.

Both the function nthroot.m and the function pownrev.m failed the vector test. Neither allowed vectorization of the integer parameter. For nthroot.m this is the same for standard Octave version so it should perhaps not be treated as a bug. The function pownrev.m uses nthroot.m internally so it also had the same limitation. This time I would however treat it as a bug because the function pown.m does allow vectorization of the integer parameter and if that supports it the reverse function should probably also do it. So I implemented support for vectorization of the integer parameter for both nthroot.m and pownrev.m and they now pass the test.

No problems were found with the N-dimensional tests that the vector tests did not find. This is a good indication that the support for N-dimensional arrays is at least partly correct. Always good to know!

## Friday, 28 July 2017

### A Package for Taylor Arithmetic

In the last blog post I wrote about what was left to do with implementing support for N-dimensional arrays in the interval package. There are still some things to do but I have had, and most likely will have, some time to work on other things. Before the summer I started to work on a proof of concept implementation of Taylor arithmetic in Octave and this week I have continued to work on that. This blog post will be about that.

## A Short Introduction to Taylor Arithmetic

Taylor arithmetic is a way to calculate with truncated Taylor expansions of functions. The main benefit is that it can be used to calculate derivatives of arbitrary order.

Taylor expansion or Taylor series (I will use these words interchangeably) are well known and from Wikipedia we have: The Taylor series of real or complex valued function $f(x)$ that is infinitely differentiable at a real or complex number $a$ is the power series
$$f(a) + \frac{f'(a)}{1!}(x-a) + \frac{f''(a)}{2!}(x-a)^2 + \frac{f'''(a)}{3!}(x-a)^3 + ....$$
From the definition it is clear that if we happen to know the coefficients of the Taylor series of $f$ at the point $a$ we can also calculate all derivatives of $f$ at that point by simply multiplying a coefficient with the corresponding factorial.

The simplest example of Taylor arithmetic is addition of two Taylor series. If $f$ has the Taylor series $\sum_{n=0}^\infty (f)_n (x-a)^n$ and $g$ the Taylor series $\sum_{n=0}^\infty (g)_n (x-a)^n$ then $f + g$ will have the Taylor series
$$\sum_{n=0}^\infty (f + g)_n (x-a)^n = \sum_{n=0}^\infty ((f)_n + (g)_n)(x-a)^n$$
If we instead consider the product, $fg$, we get
$$\sum_{n=0}^\infty (fg)_n (x-a)^n = \sum_{n=0}^\infty \left(\sum_{i=0}^n (f)_n(g)_n\right)(x-a)^n.$$

With a bit of work you can find similar formulas for other standard functions. For example the coefficients, $(e^f)_n$, of the Taylor expansion of $\exp(f)$ is given by $(e^f)_0 = e^{(f)_0}$ and for $n > 0$
$$(e^f)_n = \frac{1}{n}\sum_{i=0}^{n-1}(k-j)(e^f)_i(f)_{n-i}.$$

When doing the computations on a computer we consider truncated Taylor series, we choose an order and keep only coefficients up to that order. There is also nothing that stops us from using intervals as coefficients, this allows us to get rigorous enclosures of derivatives of functions.

For a more complete introduction to Taylor arithmetic in conjunction with interval arithmetic see [1] which was my first encounter to it. For another implementation of it in code take a look at [2].

## Current Implementation Status

As mentioned in the last post my repository can be found here

When I started to write on the package, before summer, my main goal was to get something working quickly. Thus I implemented the basic functions needed to do some kind of Taylor arithmetic, a constructor, some help functions and a few functions like $\exp$ and $\sin$.

This last week I have focused on implementing the basic utility functions, for example $size$, and rewriting the constructor. In the process I think I have broken the arithmetic functions, I will fix them later.

You can at least create and display Taylor expansions now. For example creating a variable $x$ with value 5 of order 3

> x = taylor (infsupdec (5), 3)
x = [5]_com + [1]_com X + [0]_com X^2 + [0]_com X^3

or a matrix with 4 variables of order 2

> X = taylor (infsupdec ([1, 2; 3, 4]), 2)
X = 2×2 Taylor matrix of order 2

ans(:,1) =

[1]_com + [1]_com X + [0]_com X^2
[3]_com + [1]_com X + [0]_com X^2

ans(:,2) =

[2]_com + [1]_com X + [0]_com X^2
[4]_com + [1]_com X + [0]_com X^2

If you want you can create a Taylor expansion with explicitly given coefficients you can do that as well

> f = taylor (infsupdec ([1; -2; 3, -4))
f = [1]_com + [-2]_com X + [3]_com X^2 + [-4]_com X^3

This would represent a function $f$ with $f(a) = 1$, $f'(a) = -2$, $f''(a) = 3 \cdot 2! = 6$ and $f'''(a) = -4 \cdot 3! = -24$.

## Creating a Package

My goal is to create a full package for Taylor arithmetic along with some functions making use of it. The most important step is of course to create a working implementation but there are other things to consider as well. I have a few things I have not completely understood about it. Depending on how much time I have next week I will try to read a bit more about it probably ask some questions on the mailing list. Here are at least some of the things I have been thinking about

### Mercurial vs Git?

I have understood that most of the Octave forge packages uses Mercurial for version control. I was not familiar with Mercurial before so the natural choice for me was to use Git. Now I feel I could switch to Mercurial if needed but I would like to know the potential benefits better, I'm still new to Mercurial so I don't have the full picture. One benefit is of course that it is easier if most  packages use the same system, but other than that?

### How much work is it?

If I were to manage a package for Taylor arithmetic how much work is it? This summer I have been working full time with Octave so I have had lots of time but this will of course not always be the case. I know it takes time if I want to continue to improve the package, but how much, and what, continuous work is there?

### What is needed besides the implementation?

From what I have understood there are a couple of things that should be included in a package besides the actual m-files. For example a Makefile for creating the release, an INDEX-file and a CITATION-file. I should probably also include some kind of documentation, especially since Taylor arithmetic is not that well known. Is there anything else I need to think about?

### What is the process to get a package approved?

If I were to apply (whatever that means) for the package to go to Octave forge what is the process for that? What is required before it can be approved and what is required after it is approved?

[1] W. Tucker, Validated Numerics, Princeton University Press, 2011.
[2] F. Blomquist, W. Hofschuster, W. Krämer, Real and complex taylor arithmetic in C-XSC, Preprint 2005/4, Bergische Universität Wuppertal.

## Friday, 14 July 2017

One of my first posts on this blog was a timeline for my work during the project. Predicting the amount of time something takes is always hard to do. Often time you tend to underestimate the complexity of parts of the work. This time however I overestimated the time the work would take.

If my timeline would have been correct I would have just started to work on Folding Functions (or reductions as they are often called). Instead I have completed the work on them and also for functions regarding plotting. In addition I have started to work on the documentation for the package as well as checking everything an extra time.

In this blog post I will go through what I have done this week, what I think is left to do and a little bit about what I might do if I complete the work on N-dimensional arrays in good time.

## This Week

### The Dot Function

The $dot$-function was the last function left to implement support for N-dimensional arrays in. It is very similar to the $sum$-function so I already had an idea of how to do it. As with  $sum$ I moved most of the handling of the vectorization from the m-files to the oct-file, the main reason being improved performance.

The $dot$-functions for intervals is actually a bit different from the standard one. First of all it supports vectorization which the standard one does not

> dot ([1, 2, 3; 4, 5, 6], 5)
error: dot: size of X and Y must match
> dot (infsupdec ([1, 2, 3; 4, 5, 6], 5)
ans = 1x3 interval vector

[25]_com   [35]_com   [45]_com

It also treats empty arrays a little different, see bug #51333,

> dot ([], [])
ans = [](1x0)
> dot (infsupdec ([]), [])
ans = [0]_com

### Package Documentation

I have done the minimal required changes to the documentation. That is I moved support for N-dimensional arrays from Limitation to Features and added some simple examples on how to create N-dimensional arrays.

### Searching for Misses

During the work I have tried to update the documentation for all functions to account for the support of N-dimensional arrays and I have also tried to update some of the comments for the code. But as always, especially when working with a lot of files, you miss things, both in the documentation and old comments.

I did a quick grep for the words "matrix" and "matrices" since they are candidates for being changed to "array". Doing this I found 35 files where I missed things. It was mainly minor things, comments using the "matrix" which I now changed to "array", but also some documentation which I had forgotten to update.

## What is Left?

### Package Documentation - Examples

As mentioned above I have done the minimal required changes to the documentation. It would be very nice to add some more interesting example using N-dimensional arrays of intervals in a useful way. Ironically I have not been able to come up with an interesting example but I will continue to think about it. If you have an example that you think would be interesting and want to share, please let me know!

### Coding Style

As I mentioned in one of the first blog posts, the coding style for the interval package was not following the standard for Octave. During my work I have adapted all files I have worked with to the coding standard for Octave. A lot of the files I have not needed to do any changes to, so they are still using the old style. It would probably be a good idea to update them as well.

### Testing - ITF1788

The interval framwork libary developed by Oliver is used to test the correctness of many of the functions in the package. At the moment it tests evaluation of scalars but in principle it should be no problem to use it for testing vectorization or even broadcasting. Oliver has already started to work on this.

## After N-dimensional arrays?

If I continue at this pace I will finish the work on N-dimensional arrays before the time of the project is over. Of course the things that are left might take longer than expected, they usually do, but there is a chance that I will have time left after everything is done. So what should I do then? There are more thing that can be done on the interval package, for example adding more examples to the documentation, however I think I would like to start working on a new package for Taylor arithmetics.

Before GSoC I started to implement a proof of concept for Taylor arithmetics in Ocatve which can be found here. I would then start to work on implementing a proper version of it, where I would actually make use of N-dimensional interval arrays. If I want to create a package for this I would also need to learn a lot of other things, one of them being how to manage a package on octave forge.

At the moment I will try to finish my work on N-dimensional arrays. Then I can discuss it with Oliver and see what he thinks about it.

## Friday, 7 July 2017

### Set inversion with fsolve

This week my work have mainly been focused on the interval version of fsolve. I was not sure if and how this could make use of N-dimensional arrays and to find that out I had to understand the function. In the end it turned out that the only generalization that could be done were trivial and required very few changes. However I did find some other problems with the functions that I have been able to fix. Connected to fsolve are the functions ctc_intersect and ctc_union. The also needed only minor changes to allow for N-dimensional input. I will start by giving an introduction to fsolve, ctc_union and ctc_intersect and then I will mention the changes I have done to them.

## Introduction to fsolve

The standard version of fsolve in Octave is used to solve systems of nonlinear equations. That is, given a functions $f$ and a starting point $x_0$ it returns a value $x$ such that $f(x)$ is close to zero. The interval version of fsolve does much more than this. It is used to enclose the preimage of a set $Y$ under $f$. Given a domain $X$, a set $Y$ and a function $f$ it returns an enclosure of the set
$$f^{-1}(Y) = \{x \in X: f(x) \in Y\}.$$
By letting $Y = 0$ we get similar functionality as the standard fsolve, with the difference that the output is an enclosure of all zeros to the function (compared to one point for which $f$ returns close to zero).

### Example: The Unit Circle

Consider the function $f(x, y) = \sqrt{x^2 + y^2} - 1$ which is zero exactly on the unit circle. Plugging this in to the standard fsolve we get with $(0.5, 0.5)$ as a starting guess

> x = fsolve (@(x) f(x(1), x(2)), [0.5, 0.5])
x = 0.70711 0.70711

which indeed is close to a zero. But we get no information about other zeros.

Using the interval version of fsolve with $X = [-3, 3] \times [-3, 3]$ as starting domain we get

> [x paving] = fsolve (f, infsup ([-3, -3], [3, 3]));
> x
x ⊂ 2×1 interval vector

[-1.002, +1.002]
[-1.0079, +1.0079]

Plotting the paving we get the picture

which indeed is a good enclosure of the unit circle.

### How it works

In its simplest form fsolve uses a simple bisection scheme to find the enclosure. Using interval methods we can find enclosure to images of sets. Given a set $X_0 \subset X$ we have three different possibilities
• $f(X_0) \subset Y$ in which case we add $X_0$ to the paving
• $f(X_0) \cap Y = \emptyset$ in which case we discard $X_0$
• Otherwise we bisect $X_0$ and continue on the parts
By setting a tolerance of when to stop bisecting boxes we get the algorithm to terminate in a finite number of steps.

### Contractors

Using bisection is not always very efficient, especially when the domain has many dimensions. One way to speed up the convergence is with what's called contractors. In short a contractor is a function that can take the set $X_0$ and returns a set $X_0' \subset X_0$ with the property that $f(X_0 \setminus X_0') \cap Y = \emptyset$. It's a way of making $X_0$ smaller without having to bisect it that many times.

When you construct a contractor you use the reverse operations definer on intervals. I will not go into how this works, if you are interested you can find more information in the package documentation [1] and in these youtube videos about Set Inversion Via Interval Analysis (SIVIA) [2].

The functions ctc_union and ctc_intersect are used to combine contractors on sets into contractors on unions or intersections of these sets.

## Generalization to N-dimensional arrays

How can fsolve be generalized to N-dimensional arrays? The only natural thing to do is to allow for the input and output of $f$ to be N-dimensional arrays. This also is no problem to do. While you mathematically probably would say that fsolve is used to do set inversion for functions $f: \mathbb{R}^n \to \mathbb{R}^m$ it can of course also be used for example on functions $f: \mathbb{R}^{n_1}\times \mathbb{R}^{n_2} \to \mathbb{R}^{m_1}\times \mathbb{R}^{m_2}$.

This is however a bit different when using vectorization. When not using vectorization (and not using contractions) fsolve expects that the functions takes one argument which is an array with each element corresponding to a variable. If vectorization is used it instead assumes that the functions takes one argument for each variable. Every argument is then given as a vector with each element corresponding to one value of the variable for which to compute the function. Here we have no use of N-dimensional arrays.

## Modifications

The only change in functionality that I have done to the functions is to allow for N-dimensional arrays as input and output when vectorization is not used. This required only minor changes, essentially changing expressions like
max (max (wid (interval)))

to
max (wid (interval)(:))

It was also enough to do these changes in ctc_union and ctc_intersect to have these support N-dimensional arrays.

I have made no functional changes when vectorization is used. I have however made an optimization in the construction of the arguments to the function. The arguments are stored in an array but before being given to the function they need to be split up into the different variables. This is done by creating a cell array with each element being a vector with the values of one of the variables. Previously the construction of this cell array was very inefficient, it split the interval into its lower and upper part and then called the constructor to create an interval again. Now it copies the intervals into the cell without having to call the constructor. This actually seems have been quite a big improvement, using the old version the example with the unit circle from above took around 0.129 seconds and with the new version it takes about 0.092 seconds. This is of course only one benchmark, but a speed up of about 40% for this test is promising!

Lastly I noticed a problem in the example used in the documentation of the function. The function used is

# Solve x1 ^ 2 + x2 ^ 2 = 1 for -3 ≤ x1, x2 ≤ 3 again,
# but now contractions speed up the algorithm.
function [fval, cx1, cx2] = f (y, x1, x2)
# Forward evaluation
x1_sqr = x1 .^ 2;
x2_sqr = x2 .^ 2;
fval = hypot (x1, x2);
# Reverse evaluation and contraction
y = intersect (y, fval);
# Contract the squares
x1_sqr = intersect (x1_sqr, y - x2_sqr);
x2_sqr = intersect (x2_sqr, y - x1_sqr);
# Contract the parameters
cx1 = sqrrev (x1_sqr, x1);
cx2 = sqrrev (x2_sqr, x2);
endfunction

Do you see the problem? I think it took me more than a day to realize that the problems I was having was not because of a bug in fsolve but because this function computes the wrong thing. The function is supposed to be $f(x_1, x_2) = x_1^2 + x_2^2$ but when calculating the value it calls hypot which is given by $hypot(x_1, x_2) = \sqrt{x_1^2 + x_2^2}$. For $f(x_1, x_2) = 1$, which is used in the example, it gives the same result, but otherwise it will of course not work.

[1] https://octave.sourceforge.io/interval/package_doc/Parameter-Estimation.html#Parameter-Estimation

## Friday, 30 June 2017

### One Month In

Now one month of GSoC has passed and so far everything has gone much better than I expected! According to my timeline this week would have been the first of two were I work on vectorization. Instead I have already mostly finished the vectorization and have started to work on other things. In this blog post I'll give a summary of what work I have completed and what I have left to do. I'll structure it according to where the functions are listed in the $INDEX$-file [1]. The number after the heading is the number of functions in that category.

Since this will mainly be a list of which files have been modified and which are left to do this might not be very interesting if you are not familiar with the structure of the interval package.

### Interval constant (3)

All of these have been modified to support N-dimensional arrays.

### Interval constructor (5)

All of these have been modified to support N-dimensional arrays.

### Interval function (most with tightest accuracy) (63)

Almost all of these functions worked out of the box! At least after the API functions to the MPFR and crlibm libraries were fixed, they are further down in the list.

The only function that did not work immediately were $linspace$. Even though this function could be generalized to N-dimensinal arrays the standard Octave function only works for matrices (I think the Matlab version only allows scalars). This means that adding support for N-dimensional vectors for the interval version is not a priority. I might do it later on but it is not necessary.

### Interval matrix operation (16)

Most of the matrix functions does not make sense for N-dimensional arrays. For example matrix multiplication and matrix inversion only makes sense for matrices. However all of the reduction functions are also here, they include $dot$, $prod$, $sum$, $sumabs$ and $sumsq$.

At the moment I have implemented support for N-dimensional arrays for $sum$, $sumabs$ and $prod$. The functions $dot$ and $sumsq$ are not ready, I'm waiting to see what happens with bug #51333 [2] before I continue with that work. Depending on the bug I might also have to modify the behaviour of $sum$, $sumabs$ and $prod$ slightly.

### Interval comparison (19)

All of these have been modified to support N-dimensional arrays.

### Set operation (7)

All of these functions have been modified to support N-dimensional arrays except one, $mince$. The function $mince$ is an interval version of $linspace$ and reasoning here is the same as that for $linspace$ above.

### Interval reverse operation (12)

Like the interval functions above, all of the functions worked out of the box!

### Interval numeric function (11)

Also these functions worked out of the box, with some small modifications to the documentation for some of them.

### Interval input and output (9)

Here there are some functions which require some comments, the ones I do not comment about have all gotten support for N-dimensional arrays.

$interval\_bitpack$
I think that this function does not make sense to generalize to N-dimensions. It could perhaps take an N-dimensional arrays as input, but it will always return a row vector.  I have left it as it is for now at least.

$disp$ and $display$
These are functions that might be subject to change later on. At the moment it prints N-dimensional arrays of intervals in the same way Octave does for normal arrays. It's however not clear how to handle the $\subset$ symbol and we might decide to change it.

### Interval solver or optimizer (5)

The functions $gauss$ and $polyval$ are not generalizable to N-dimensional vectors. I don't think that $fzero$ can be generalized either, for it to work the functions must be real-valued.

The function $fsolve$ can perhaps be modified to support N-dimensional vectors. It uses the SIVIA algorithm [3] and I have to dive deeper into how it works to see if it can be done.

For $fminsearch$ nothing needed to be done, it worked for N-dimensional arrays directly.

### Interval contractor arithmetic (2)

Both of these functions are used together with $fsolve$ so they also depend on if SIVIA can be generalized or not.

### Verified solver or optimizer (6)

All of these functions work on matrices and cannot be generalized.

### Utility function (29)

All of these for which it made sense have been modified to support N-dimensional arrays. Some of them only works for matrices, these are $ctranspose$, $diag$, $transpose$, $tril$ and $triu$. I have left them as they were, though I fixed a bug in $diag$.

### API function to the MPFR and crlibm libraries (8)

These are the functions that in general required most work. The ones I have added full support for N-dimensional arrays in are $crlibm\_function$, $mpfr\_function\_d$ and $mpfr\_vector\_sum\_d$. Some of them cannot be generalized, these are $mpfr\_matrix\_mul_d$, $mpfr\_matrix\_sqr\_d$ and $mpfr\_to\_string\_d$. The functions $mpfr\_linspace\_d$ and $mpfr\_vector\_dot\_d$ are related to what I mentioned above for $linspace$ and $dot$.

### Summary

So summing up the functions that still require some work are
• Functions related to $fsolve$
• The functions $dot$ and $sumsq$
• The functions $linspace$ and $mince$
Especially the functions related to $fsolve$ might take some time to handle. My goal is to dive deeper into this next week.

Apart from this there are also some more things that needs to be considered. The documentation for the package will need to be updated. This includes adding some examples which make use of the new functionality.

The interval package also did not follow the coding style for Octave. All the functions which I have made changes to have been updated with the correct coding style, but many of the functions that worked out of the box still use the old style. It might be that we want to unify the coding standard for all files before the next release.

[1] The $INDEX$ file https://sourceforge.net/u/urathai/octave/ci/default/tree/INDEX
[2] Bug #51333 https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?51333

## Thursday, 22 June 2017

At the moment I'm actually ahead of my schedule and this week I started to work on support for vectorization on N-dimensional arrays. The by far biggest challenge was to implement proper broadcasting and most of this post will be devoted to going through that. At the end I also mention some of the other things I have done during the week.

At the moment I have implement support for broadcasting on all binary functions. Since all binary functions behave similarly in respect to broadcasting I will use $+$ in all my example below, but this could in principle be any binary function working on intervals.

When adding to arrays, $A, B$, of the same size the result is just an arrays of the same size with each entry containing the sum of the corresponding entries in $A$ and $B$. If $A$ and $B$ does not have the same size then we try to perform broadcasting. The simplest form of broadcasting is when $A$ is an arrays and $B$ is a scalar. Then we just take the value of $B$ and add to every element in $A$. For example

> A = infsupdec ([1, 2; 3, 4])
A = 2×2 interval matrix
[1]_com   [2]_com
[3]_com   [4]_com
> B = infsupdec (5)
B = [5]_com
> A + B
ans = 2×2 interval matrix
[6]_com   [7]_com
[8]_com   [9]_com

However it is not only when one of the inputs is a scalar that broadcasting can be performed. Broadcasting is performed separately for each dimension of the input. We require either that the dimensions are equal, and no broadcasting is performed, or that one of the inputs have that dimension equal to $1$, we then concatenate this input along that dimension until they are of equal size. If for example $A$ has dimension $4\times4\times4$ and $B$ dimension $4\times4\times1$ we concatenate $B$ with itself along the third dimension four times to get two arrays of the same size. Since a scalar has all dimensions equal to 1 we see that it can be broadcasted to any size. Both $A$ and $B$ can also be broadcasted at the same time, along different dimensions, for example

> A = infsupdec (ones (1, 5, 2))
A = 1×5×2 interval array
ans(:,:,1) =
[1]_com   [1]_com   [1]_com   [1]_com   [1]_com
ans(:,:,2) =
[1]_com   [1]_com   [1]_com   [1]_com   [1]_com
> B = infsupdec ([1, 2, 3, 4, 5; 6, 7, 8, 9, 10])
B = 2×5 interval matrix
[1]_com   [2]_com   [3]_com   [4]_com    [5]_com
[6]_com   [7]_com   [8]_com   [9]_com   [10]_com
> A + B
ans = 2×5×2 interval array
ans(:,:,1) =
[2]_com   [3]_com   [4]_com    [5]_com    [6]_com
[7]_com   [8]_com   [9]_com   [10]_com   [11]_com
ans(:,:,2) =
[2]_com   [3]_com   [4]_com    [5]_com    [6]_com
[7]_com   [8]_com   [9]_com   [10]_com   [11]_com

### The implementation

I'll go through a little bit about my implementation. I warn you that I'm not that familiar with the internals of Octave so some things I say might be wrong, or at least not totally correct.

Internally all, numerical, arrays are stored as a linear vector and the dimensions are only metadata. This means that the most efficient way to walk through an array is with a linearly increasing index. When $A$ and $B$ have the same size the most efficient way to sum them is to linearly go through the arrays. In pseudo code

// Calculate C = A + B
for (int i = 0; i < numel (A); i++) {
C(i) = A(i) + B(i);
}

This works fine, and apart from unrolling the loop or doing optimizations like that it is probably the most efficient way to do it.

If $A$ and $B$ are not of the same size then one way to do it would be to simply extend $A$ or/and $B$ along the needed dimensions. This would however require coping a lot of data, something we want to avoid (memory access is expensive). Instead we try to be smart with our indexing to access the right data from both $A$ and $B$.

After asking on the IRC-channel I got pointed to this Octave function which performs broadcasting. My implementation, which can be found here, is heavily inspired by that function.

### Performance

Here I compare the performance of the new implementation with the old one. Since the old one could only handle matrices we are limited by that. We can measure the time it takes to add two matrices $A$, $B$ with the code

tic; A + B; toc;

We do 10 runs for each test and all times are in seconds.

Case 1: A = B = infsupdec (ones (1000, 1000));
Old         New
0.324722    0.277179
0.320914    0.276116
0.322018    0.276075
0.318713    0.279258
0.332041    0.279593
0.318429    0.279987
0.323752    0.279089
0.317823    0.276036
0.320509    0.280964
0.320610    0.281123
Mean:  0.32195     0.27854
Case 2: A = B = infsupdec (ones (10, 100000));
Old         New
0.299321    0.272691
0.297020    0.282591
0.296460    0.274298
0.294541    0.279661
0.298306    0.277274
0.301532    0.275531
0.298163    0.278576
0.298954    0.279868
0.302849    0.275991
0.297765    0.278806
Mean:   0.29849    0.27753

Case 3: A = B = infsupdec (ones (100000, 10));
Old         New
0.286433    0.279107
0.289503    0.278251
0.297562    0.279579
0.292759    0.283311
0.292983    0.281306
0.290947    0.282310
0.293025    0.286172
0.294153    0.278886
0.293457    0.278625
0.296661    0.280804
Mean:   0.29275     0.28084

Case 4: A = infsupdec (ones (1000, 1000));
B = infsupdec (1);
Old         New
0.298695    0.292419
0.298158    0.292274
0.305242    0.296036
0.295867    0.291311
0.296971    0.297255
0.304297    0.292871
0.298172    0.300329
0.297251    0.291668
0.299236    0.294128
0.300457    0.298005
Mean;   0.29943     0.29463

Case 5: A = infsupdec (1);
B = infsupdec (ones (1000, 1000));
Old         New
0.317276    0.291100
0.316858    0.296519
0.316617    0.292958
0.316159    0.299662
0.317939    0.301558
0.322162    0.295338
0.321277    0.293561
0.314640    0.291500
0.317211    0.295487
0.317177    0.294376
Mean:   0.31773     0.29521

Case 6: A = infsupdec (ones (1000, 1000));
B = infsupdec (ones (1000, 1));
Old         New
0.299546    0.284229
0.301177    0.284458
0.300725    0.276269
0.299368    0.276957
0.303953    0.278034
0.300894    0.275058
0.301776    0.276692
0.302462    0.282946
0.304010    0.275573
0.301196    0.273109
Mean:   0.30151     0.27833

Case 7: A = infsupdec (ones (1000, 1000));
B = infsupdec (ones (1, 1000));
Old         New
0.300554    0.295892
0.301361    0.294287
0.302575    0.299116
0.304808    0.294184
0.306700    0.291606
0.301233    0.298059
0.301591    0.292777
0.302998    0.290288
0.300452    0.291975
0.305531    0.290178
Mean:   0.30278     0.29384

We see that in all cases the new version is faster or at least equally fast as the old version. In the old version the order of the input made a slight difference in performance (case 4 vs case 5). In the new version both inputs are treated in exactly the same way so we no longer see that difference.

### Possible improvements

In theory the cases when we broadcast a scalar could be the fastest ones. If $B$ is a scalar we could, in pseudo code, do something similar to
// Calculate C = A + B with B scalar
for (int i = 0; i < numel (A); i++) {
C(i) = A(i) + B;
}

This is however not implemented at the moment. Instead we use the ordinary routine to calculate the index for $B$ (since it is a scalar it will always evaluate to $1$). If we would like to optimize more for this case we could add a check for if $A$ or $B$ are scalars and then optimize for that. Of course this would also make the code more complicated, something to watch out for. At the moment I leave it like this but if we later want to optimize for that case it could be done.

## Other work

Apart from the work to fix the broadcasting for binary functions there were very little to do for many of the functions. All binary functions that use this code, and all unary functions using an even simpler code, worked directly after fixing the oct-files. Some of them required small changes to the documentation but other than that the octave-scripts were fine. So mainly it has been a matter of actually going through all files and check that they actually did work.

### Bug #51283

When going through all the functions I noticed a bug in the interval version of $\sin$,

> sin (infsupdec (0))
ans = [0]_com
> sin (infsupdec ([0, 0]))
ans = 1×2 interval vector
[0, -0]_com   [0, -0]_com

The second version here is wrong, $-0$ should never be allowed as a value for the supremum of an interval. I was able to track this down to how Octaves $\max$ function works, see bug #51283. As Oliver writes there the exact behaviour of the $\max$-function is not specified in IEEE Std 754-2008 so we cannot rely on that. To solve this I have added a line to manually set all $-0$ to $+0$ in the supremum of the interval.