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## 15.4 Log sum of exponentials

Working on the log scale, multiplication is converted to addition, $\log (a \cdot b) = \log a + \log b.$ Thus sequences of multiplication operations can remain on the log scale. But what about addition? Given $$\log a$$ and $$\log b$$, how do we get $$\log (a + b)$$? Working out the algebra, $\log (a + b) = \log (\exp(\log a) + \exp(\log b)).$

### 15.4.1 Log-sum-exp function

The nested log of sum of exponentials is so common, it has its own name, “log-sum-exp”, $\textrm{log-sum-exp}(u, v) = \log (\exp(u) + \exp(v)).$ so that $\log (a + b) = \textrm{log-sum-exp}(\log a, \log b).$

Although it appears this might overflow as soon as exponentiation is introduced, evaluation does not proceed by evaluating the terms as written. Instead, with a little algebra, the terms are rearranged into a stable form, $\textrm{log-sum-exp}(u, v) = \max(u, v) + \log\big( \exp(u - \max(u, v)) + \exp(v - \max(u, v)) \big).$

Because the terms inside the exponentiations are $$u - \max(u, v)$$ and $$v - \max(u, v)$$, one will be zero and the other will be negative. Because the operation is symmetric, it may be assumed without loss of generality that $$u \geq v$$, so that $\textrm{log-sum-exp}(u, v) = u + \log\big(1 + \exp(v - u)\big).$

Although the inner term may itself be evaluated using the built-in function log1p, there is only limited gain because $$\exp(v - u)$$ is only near zero when $$u$$ is much larger than $$v$$, meaning the final result is likely to round to $$u$$ anyway.

To conclude, when evaluating $$\log (a + b)$$ given $$\log a$$ and $$\log b$$, and assuming $$\log a > \log b$$, return

$\log (a + b) = \log a + \textrm{log1p}\big(\exp(\log b - \log a)\big).$

### 15.4.2 Applying log-sum-exp to a sequence

The log sum of exponentials function may be generalized to sequences in the obvious way, so that if $$v = v_1, \ldots, v_N$$, then $\begin{eqnarray*} \textrm{log-sum-exp}(v) & = & \log \sum_{n = 1}^N \exp(v_n) \\[4pt] & = & \max(v) + \log \sum_{n = 1}^N \exp(v_n - \max(v)). \end{eqnarray*}$ The exponent cannot overflow because its argument is either zero or negative. This form makes it easy to calculate $$\log (u_1 + \cdots + u_N)$$ given only $$\log u_n$$.

### 15.4.3 Calculating means with log-sum-exp

An immediate application is to computing the mean of a vector $$u$$ entirely on the log scale. That is, given $$\log u$$ and returning $$\log \textrm{mean}(u)$$. $\begin{eqnarray*} \log \left( \frac{1}{N} \sum_{n = 1}^N u_n \right) & = & \log \frac{1}{N} + \log \sum_{n = 1}^N \exp(\log u_n) \\[4pt] & = & -\log N + \textrm{log-sum-exp}(\log u). \end{eqnarray*}$ where $$\log u = (\log u_1, \ldots, \log u_N)$$ is understood elementwise.