Working with very small values in R

When you’re working on extremely small floating numbers in R (such as when you have strong p-values), there are a few options.

1. Rmpfr package
2. Parse the string of values in scientific notation. Let’s say you have small values in P column in a dataframe df and those numbers are represented as 1e-400 etc. Then, you can run something like this to parse and compute the log10(P) value.

df %>%
separate(
    p_value, c("P_base", "P_exp"),
    sep = "e", remove = F, fill = "right"
) %>%
replace_na(list(P_exp = "0")) %>%
mutate(log10P = log10(as.numeric(P_base)) + as.numeric(P_exp))