State-of-the-art static analysis tools for verifying finite-precision code
compute worst-case absolute error bounds on numerical errors. These are,
however, often not a good estimate of accuracy as they do not take into account
the magnitude of the computed values. Relative errors, which compute errors
relative to the value's magnitude, are thus preferable. While today's tools do
report relative error bounds, these are merely computed via absolute errors and
thus not necessarily tight or more informative. Furthermore, whenever the
computed value is close to zero on part of the domain, the tools do not report
any relative error estimate at all. Surprisingly, the quality of relative error
bounds computed by today's tools has not been systematically studied or
reported to date. In this paper, we investigate how state-of-the-art static
techniques for computing sound absolute error bounds can be used, extended and
combined for the computation of relative errors. Our experiments on a standard
benchmark set show that computing relative errors directly, as opposed to via
absolute errors, is often beneficial and can provide error estimates up to six
orders of magnitude tighter, i.e. more accurate. We also show that interval
subdivision, another commonly used technique to reduce over-approximations, has
less benefit when computing relative errors directly, but it can help to
alleviate the effects of the inherent issue of relative error estimates close
to zero
