Comment by extrabajs
18 hours ago
What is Fig. 1 showing? Is it the value of the integral compared with two approximations? Would it not be more interesting to show the error of the approximations instead? Asking for a friend who isn’t computing a lot of integrals.
Fig 1 could use a rethink. It uses log scale, but the dynamic range of the y-axis is tiny, so the log transform isn't doing anything.
It would be better shown as a table with 3 numbers. Or, maybe two columns, one for integral value and one for error, as you suggest.
Yeah - my guess is this was just a very roundabout solution for setting axis limits.
(For some reason, plt.bar was used instead of plt.plot, so the y axis would start at 0 by default, making all results look the same. But when the log scale is applied, the lower y limit becomes the data’s minimum. So, because the dynamic range is so low, the end result is visually identical to having just set y limits using the original linear scale).
Anyhow for anyone interested the values for those 3 points are 2.0000 (exact), 1.9671 (trapezoid), and 1.9998 (gaussian). The relatives errors are 1.6% vs. 0.01%.
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