Current Bioinformatics Seminar
Time: 11AM Tuesdays.
Venue: Davis Auditorium and Online
12 May 2026
Computing the incomplete β function
Justin BedoWEHI
The incomplete β function is difficult to compute yet fundamental to many areas of mathematics. In statistics, it underlies many cumulative distribution functions, hence has wide ranging impact in many areas of statistical testing, notably for bioinformatics tests such as the t-test and F-test. In this talk I will present some elementary bounds for the incomplete beta function and demonstrate how they can be used to precisely estimate the incomplete β function even for extremely small values. I will show that the approach is computationally efficient, and that other algorithms have regions of high errors. The resulting algorithm is very simple to implement.