How to deal with underflow in scientific computing?

Question

I am working on probabilistic models, and when doing inference on those models, the estimated probabilities can become very small. In order to avoid underflow, I am currently working in the log domain (I store the log of the probabilities). Multiplying probabilities is equivalent to an addition, and summing is done by using the formula:

log(exp(a) + exp(b)) = log(exp(a - m) + exp(b - m)) + m

where m = max(a, b).

I use some very large matrices, and I have to take the element-wise exponential of those matrices to compute matrix-vector multiplications. This step is quite expensive, and I was wondering if there exist other methods to deal with underflow, when working with probabilities.

Edit: for efficiency reasons, I am looking for a solution using primitive types and not objects storing arbitrary-precision representation of real numbers.

Edit 2: I am looking for a faster solution than the log domain trick, not a more accurate solution. I am happy with the accuracy I currently get, but I need a faster method. Particularly, summations happen during matrix-vector multiplications, and I would like to be able to use efficient BLAS methods.

Solution: after a discussion with Jonathan Dursi, I decided to factorize each matrix and vector by its largest element, and to store that factor in the log domain. Multiplications are straightforward. Before additions, I have to factorize one of the added matrices/vectors by the ratio of the two factors. I update the factor every ten operations.

Answer 1

This issue has come up recently on the computational science stack exchange site as well, and although there the immediate worry there was overflow, the issues are more or less the same.

Transforming into log space is certainly one reasonable approach. Whatever space you're in, to do a large number of sums correctly, there's a couple of methods you can use to improve the accuracy of your summations. Compensated summation approaches, most famously Kahan summation, keep both a sum and what's effectively a "remainder"; it gives you some of the advantages of using higher precision arithmeitic without all of the cost (and only using primitive types). The remainder term also gives you some indication of how well you're doing.

In addition to improving the actual mechanics of your addition, changing the order of how you add your terms can make a big difference. Sorting your terms so that you're summing from smallest to largest can help, as then you're no longer adding terms as frequently that are very different (which can cause significant roundoff problems); in some cases, doing log₂ N repeated pairwise sums can also be an improvement over just doing the straight linear sum, depending on what your terms look like.

The usefullness of all these approaches depend a lot on the properties of your data. The arbitrary precision math libraries, while enormously expensive in compute time (and possibly memory) to use, have the advantage of being a fairly general solution.