nearbyclose

nearbyclose is a lightweight open‑source library for performing approximate equality comparisons on numeric data. It was originally developed for scientific computing projects that require flexible tolerance handling in floating‑point arithmetic. The core feature of nearbyclose is the nearbyclose() function, which takes two numbers and a relative or absolute tolerance, and returns true if the two values are considered equal within that tolerance. The library also offers utilities for batch comparison across arrays, integration with NumPy, and support for complex numbers.

The project was created by a team of developers working on data‑analysis tools. It is distributed under the MIT license and is maintained on GitHub, where contributors can propose improvements or new features. The library’s documentation includes examples of usage in Python, C++, and JavaScript. It also provides a compatibility layer that allows the same API to be used across different programming environments.

nearbyclose has been adopted by a number of research groups that need to avoid false positives in statistical tests, especially when working with large datasets that involve repetitive arithmetic operations. The library’s design emphasizes minimal dependencies and high performance, making it suitable for both interactive use and integration into high‑throughput pipelines.