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Best practices for handling very small numbers?

Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan <at> gmail.com> writes:
I haven't followed this carefully, but there is a special problem
in Bayesian situations where at some point you may have to *integrate*
the likelihoods, which implies dealing with them on the likelihood
(not log-likelihood) scale.  There are various ways of dealing with
this, but one is to factor a constant (which will be a very small value)
out of the elements in the integrand.

  Ben Bolker