THE ACCURACY OF FLOATING-POINT SUMMATION

The usual recursive summation technique is just one of several ways of computing the sum of n floating point numbers. Five summation methods and their variations are analyzed here. The accuracy of the methods is compared using rounding error analysis and numerical experiments. Four of the methods are shown to be special cases of a general class of methods, and an error analysis is given for this class. No one method is uniformly more accurate than the others, but some guidelines are given on the choice of method in particular cases.