Talk:Percent difference

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I reject Jitse Niesen minor edit: (changing to Category:Measurement - not sure whether that's appropriate, but this is certainly not numerical analysis). I will wait one week for any input to this matter. The reason for my rejection is: I know it sounds a bit odd to place this article in the Category: Numerical Analysis. But I do know for sure that this article must be in the same Category as Approximation error. If you read my article, you will see that Percent difference and Percent Error work hand in hand when comparing values in a lab environment. The only way I will succumb to such a category change is if someone can convince the editors of the article Approximation error to move to another Category and then I will send my article to that respective Category. I will wait one week before changing it back to Category: Numerical Analysis to see if there are any comments. Gilawson 17:13, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

In the middle of discussion to resolve the matter. Gilawson 05:58, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

Merging the two articles turned out to be futile. So I must conclude that the discussion with Jitse Niesen leads to a dead-end. You may view the debate and I suppose final conclusion from attempting to merge Percent Difference into Approximation error article in the Discussions Page of the article as well as the Talk Page of Oleg Alexandrov. The next step will be to take the information from the article Approximation error and include it into this article. However, by doing so, the title of this article will need to change so as to better describe containing the two techniques of finding the "Percent difference" and "Percent error". Gilawson 06:09, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Request: More References

Please provide a published, peer reviewed reference that shows that this is standard terminology. Online lecture notes, being self-published and not peer reviewed, are not considered reliable sources on WP. They can be used as external links, however. CMummert · talk 03:52, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

More "firm" references have been requested by CMummert. Due to the lack of "firm" references, it will take me several days to find them. I assume several more independent "lecture notes" from different Universities along with a couple of firm references will satisfy the need to strike off a well used formula as obsolete. Gilawson 04:13, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Request: Disambiguation page

I'm newish to wikipedia so I'm not sure how to do this. I think there should be a disambiguation between "percent error" and "percent difference." (http://www.mathsisfun.com/probability/percentage-difference-vs-error.html) The latter is commonly used in marketing: "Now with 50% less fat." That calculation would be {100 x (x1 - x2)/(x1)}. A big difference. —Preceding unsigned comment added by ShannonO (talk • contribs) 21:34, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Always positive?

Given the formula you provide in the article, one cannot say the percent difference is always positive if we're dealing with negative quantities. The average of two negative quantities is still negative, and as a divisor to an absolute value the quotient still comes out negative. Jcurve 03:43, 22 October 2007 (UTC)jcurve