# How to compute the probability associated with absurdly large Z-scores?

Software packages for network motif detection can return enormously high Z-scores (the highest I've seen is 600,000+, but Z-scores of more than 100 are quite common). I plan to show that these Z-scores are bogus.

Huge Z-scores correspond to extremely low associated probabilities. The values of the associated probabilities are given on e.g. the normal distribution wikipedia page (and probably every stats textbook) for Z-scores of up to 6. So...

Question: How does one compute the error function $1-\mathrm{erf}(n/\sqrt{2})$ for n up to 1,000,000, say?

I'm particularly after an already implemented package for this (if possible). The best I've found so far is WolframAlpha, which manages to compute it for n=150 (here).

• Maybe this is not the right question to ask. These z-scores are bogus because they assume the normal distribution is a far better approximation, or model, than it really is. It's a little like assuming Newtonian mechanics is good to 600,000 decimal places. If you are indeed interested solely in computing erf for extreme values of $n$, then this question belongs on math.SE, not here. – whuber Aug 1 '11 at 2:29
• For "absurdly" large values, you won't do better than using the upper bound $\Pr(Z > z) \leq (z \sqrt{2\pi})^{-1} e^{-z^2/2}$ for double-precision floating point. That approximation and others are discussed elsewhere on stats.SE. – cardinal Aug 1 '11 at 2:44
• Thanks cardinal, that bound seems to be quite accurate. Why don't you make this an answer? – Douglas S. Stones Aug 1 '11 at 10:46
• @Douglas: If you are still interested, I can put something together in the next day or so and post it as a more complete answer. – cardinal Aug 2 '11 at 20:05
• Well... I think it'd be worthwhile adding it as an answer. Maybe the bound is common knowledge in prob+stats, but I didn't know it. Also, Q's and A's here are not solely for the OP. – Douglas S. Stones Aug 2 '11 at 23:04

The question concerns the complementary error function

$$\textrm{erfc}(x) = \frac{2}{\sqrt{\pi}}\int_{x}^{\infty}\exp(-t^2) d t$$

for "large" values of $x$ ($=n/\sqrt{2}$ in the original question)--that is, between 100 and 700,000 or so. (In practice, any value greater than about 6 should be considered "large," as we will see.) Note that because this will be used to compute p-values, there is little value in obtaining more than three significant (decimal) digits.

To begin, consider the approximation suggested by @Iterator,

$$f(x) = 1 - \sqrt{1 - \exp \left(-x^2 \left(\frac{4 + ax^2}{\pi + ax^2}\right)\right)},$$

where

$$a = \frac{8(\pi-3)}{3(4-\pi)} \approx 0.439862.$$

Although this is an excellent approximation to the error function itself, it's a terrible approximation to $\textrm{erfc}$. However, there is a way to systematically fix that up.

For the p-values associated with such large values of $x$, we're interested in the relative error $f(x)/\textrm{erfc}(x) - 1$: we hope its absolute value would be less than 0.001 for three significant digits of precision. Unfortunately this expression is difficult to study for large $x$ due to underflows in double-precision computation. Here is one attempt, which plots the relative error versus $x$ for $0 \le x \le 5.8$:

The calculation becomes unstable once $x$ exceeds 5.3 or so and cannot deliver one significant digit past 5.8. This is no surprise: $\exp(-5.8^2) \approx 10^{-14.6}$ is pushing the limits of double-precision arithmetic. Because there is no evidence that the relative error is going to be acceptably small for larger $x$, we need to do better.

Performing the calculation in extended arithmetic (with Mathematica) improves our picture of what's going on:

The error increases rapidly with $x$ and shows no signs of leveling off. Past $x=10$ or so, this approximation doesn't even deliver one reliable digit of information!

However, the plot is starting to look linear. We might guess that the relative error is directly proportional to $x$. (This makes sense on theoretical grounds: $\textrm{erfc}$ is manifestly an odd function and $f$ is manifestly even, so their ratio ought to be an odd function. Thus we would expect the relative error, if it increases, to behave like an odd power of $x$.) This leads us to study the relative error divided by $x$. Equivalently, I choose to examine $x \cdot \textrm{erfc}(x)/f(x)$, because the hope is this should have a constant limiting value. Here is its graph:

Our guess appears to be borne out: this ratio does seem to be approaching a limit around 8 or so. When asked, Mathematica will supply it:

a1 = Limit[x (Erfc[x]/f[x]), x -> \[Infinity]]


The value is $a_1 = \frac{2 }{\sqrt{\pi }}e^{\frac{3 (-4+\pi )^2}{8 (-3+\pi )}} \approx 7.94325$. This enables us to improve the estimate: we take

$$f_1(x) = f(x) \frac{a_1}{x}$$

as the first refinement of the approximation. When $x$ is really large--greater than a few thousand--this approximation is just fine. Because it's still not going to be good enough for an interesting range of arguments between $5.3$ and $2000$ or so, let's iterate the procedure. This time, the inverse relative error--specifically, the expression $1 - \textrm{erfc}(x)/f_1(x)$--should behave like $1/x^2$ for large $x$ (by virtue of the previous parity considerations). Accordingly, we multiply by $x^2$ and find the next limit:

a2 = Limit[x^2 (a1 - x (Erfc[x]/f[x])), x -> \[Infinity]]


The value is

$$a_2 = \frac{1}{32 \sqrt{\pi }} e^{\frac{3 (-4+\pi )^2}{8 (-3+\pi )}} \left(32-\frac{9 (-4+\pi )^3 \pi }{(-3+\pi )^2}\right) \approx 114.687.$$

This process can proceed as long as we like. I took it out one more step, finding

a3 = Limit[x^2 (a2 - x^2 (a1 - x (Erfc[x]/f[x]))), x -> \[Infinity]]


with value approximately 1623.67. (The full expression involves a degree-eight rational function of $\pi$ and is too long to be useful here.)

Unwinding these operations yields our final approximation

$$f_3(x) = f(x)\left(a_1 - a_2/x^2 + a_3/x^4\right)/x.$$

The error is proportional to $x^{-6}$. Of import is the constant of proportionality, so we plot $x^6(1 - \textrm{erfc}(x) / f_3(x))$:

It rapidly approaches a limiting value around 2660.59. Using the approximation $f_3$, we obtain estimates of $\textrm{erfc}(x)$ whose relative accuracy is better than $2661/x^6$ for all $x \gt 0$. Once $x$ exceeds 20 or so, we have our three significant digits (or far more, as $x$ gets larger). As a check, here is a table comparing the correct values to the approximation for $x$ between $10$ and $20$:

 x  Erfc    Approximation
10  2.088*10^-45    2.094*10^-45
11  1.441*10^-54    1.443*10^-54
12  1.356*10^-64    1.357*10^-64
13  1.740*10^-75    1.741*10^-75
14  3.037*10^-87    3.038*10^-87
15  7.213*10^-100   7.215*10^-100
16  2.328*10^-113   2.329*10^-113
17  1.021*10^-127   1.021*10^-127
18  6.082*10^-143   6.083*10^-143
19  4.918*10^-159   4.918*10^-159
20  5.396*10^-176   5.396*10^-176


In fact, this approximation delivers at least two significant figures of precision for $x=8$ on, which is just about where pedestrian calculations (such as Excel's NormSDist function) peter out.

Finally, one might worry about our ability to compute the initial approximation $f$. However, that's not hard: when $x$ is large enough to cause underflows in the exponential, the square root is well approximated by half the exponential,

$$f(x) \approx \frac{1}{2} \exp \left(-x^2 \left(\frac{4 + ax^2}{\pi + ax^2}\right)\right).$$

Computing the logarithm of this (in base 10) is simple, and readily gives the desired result. For example, let $x=1000$. The common logarithm of this approximation is

$$\log_{10}(f(x)) \approx \left(-1000^2 \left(\frac{4 + a \cdot 1000^2}{\pi + a \cdot 1000^2}\right) - \log(2)\right) / \log(10) \sim -434295.63047.$$

Exponentiating yields

$$f(1000) \approx 2.34169 \cdot 10^{-434296}.$$

Applying the correction (in $f_3$) produces

$$\textrm{erfc}(1000) \approx 1.86003\ 70486\ 32328 \cdot 10^{-434298}.$$

Note that the correction reduces the original approximation by over 99% (and indeed, $a_1/x \approx 1\text{%}$.) (This approximation differs from the correct value only in the last digit. Another well-known approximation, $\exp(-x^2)/(x\sqrt{\pi})$, equals $1.860038 \cdot 10^{-434298}$, erring in the sixth significant digit. I'm sure we could improve that one, too, if we wanted, using the same techniques.)

• +1 This is a great answer, somehow I have never come across this thread before. – amoeba says Reinstate Monica May 27 '17 at 15:39

A simple upper bound



There are several nice complementary lower bounds as well. One of the handiest and easiest to derive is the bound $$S(z) \geq \frac{z}{z^2+1} \varphi(z) =: \Sl(z) \> .$$ There are at least three separate methods for deriving this bound. A rough sketch of one such method can be found in this answer to a related question.

A picture

Below is a plot of the two bounds (in grey) along with the actual function $S(z)$.

How good is it?

From the plot, it seems that the bounds become quite tight even for moderately large $z$. We might ask ourselves how tight they are and what sort of quantitative statement in that regard can be made.

One useful measure of tightness is the absolute relative error $$\newcommand{\err}{\mathcal{E}} \err(z) = \left|\frac{\Su(z) - S(z)}{S(z)}\right| \>.$$ This gives you the proportional error of the estimate.

Now, note that, since all of the involved functions are nonnegative, by using the bounding properties of $\Su(z)$ and $\Sl(z)$, we get $$\err(z) = \frac{\Su(z) - S(z)}{S(z)} \leq \frac{\Su(z) - \Sl(z)}{\Sl(z)} = z^{-2} \> ,$$ and so this provides a proof that for $z \geq 10$ the upper-bound is correct to within 1%, for $z \geq 28$ it is correct to within 0.1% and for $z \geq 100$ it is correct to within 0.01%.

In fact, the simple form of the bounds provides a good check on other "approximations". If, in the numerical calculation of more complicated approximations, we get a value outside these bounds, we can simply "correct" it to take the value of, e.g., the upper bound provided here.

There are many refinements of these bounds. The Laplace bounds mentioned here provide a nice sequence of upper and lower bounds on $S(z)$ of the form $R(z) \varphi(z)$ where $R(z)$ is a rational function.

Finally, here is another somewhat-related question and answer.

• Apologies for all the "self-citations". Once, several years ago, I took an intense, two-week-long interest in related questions and tried to learn as much as I could about this topic. – cardinal Aug 3 '11 at 15:04
• +1 Agree with whuber. Very nice, and I appreciate the links to other answers. – Iterator Aug 3 '11 at 18:46

You can approximate it with much simpler functions - see this Wikipedia section for more information. The basic approximation is that $\textrm{erf}(x) \approx \textrm{sgn}(x)\sqrt{1 - \exp(-x^2 \frac{4/\pi + ax^2}{1+ax^2}})$

The article has an incorrect link for that section. The PDF referenced can be found in Sergei Winitzki's files - or at this link.

• Some amplification of this would be welcome, for two reasons. First, it's best when answers can stand alone. Second, that article writes ambiguously about the quality of the approximation "in a neighborhood of infinity": just how accurate is "very accurate"? (You implicitly have a good sense of this, but it's a lot to expect of all interested readers.) The stated value of ".00035" is useless here. – whuber Aug 2 '11 at 21:33
• Thanks. I didn't notice that there was Javascript-based support for using TeX, which made the difference in writing that out. – Iterator Aug 2 '11 at 21:55
• Incidentally, the Wikipedia reference to that approximation is broken. Mathematica finds, though, that the relative error (1 - approx(x)/erf(x)) behaves like the reciprocal of $2 \exp(x^2+ 3(\pi-4)^2/(8(\pi-3)))$. – whuber Aug 2 '11 at 22:01
• @whuber, can you post the Mathematica code for that? :) I haven't seen Mathematica in 15+ years, and never for this kind of purpose. – Iterator Aug 2 '11 at 22:15
• I posted it in a separate reply. – whuber Aug 3 '11 at 13:46