This provide several advantages:
- more flexibility in designing unit tests
- unit tests can be glued to speed up compilation
- unit tests are compiled with same predefined macros, which is a requirement for zapcc
The commit with Bessel functions i0e and i1e placed the ifdef/endif incorrectly,
causing i0e/i1e to be undefined when EIGEN_HAS_C99_MATH=0. These functions do not
actually require C99 math, so now they are always available.
In addition to igamma(a, x), this code implements:
* igamma_der_a(a, x) = d igamma(a, x) / da -- derivative of igamma with respect to the parameter
* gamma_sample_der_alpha(alpha, sample) -- reparameterization derivative of a Gamma(alpha, 1) random variable sample with respect to the alpha parameter
The derivatives are computed by forward mode differentiation of the igamma(a, x) code. Although gamma_sample_der_alpha can be implemented via igamma_der_a, a separate function is more accurate and efficient due to analytical cancellation of some terms. All three functions are implemented by a method parameterized with "mode" that always computes the derivatives, but does not return them unless required by the mode. The compiler is expected to (and, based on benchmarks, does) skip the unnecessary computations depending on the mode.
The functions are conventionally called i0e and i1e. The exponentially scaled version is more numerically stable. The standard Bessel functions can be obtained as i0(x) = exp(|x|) i0e(x)
The code is ported from Cephes and tested against SciPy.
