title: Compressing floating point data
body: <p>Are there any lossless compression methods that can be applied to floating point time-series data, and will significantly outperform, say, writing the data as binary into a file and running it through gzip?</p>
  
  <p>Reduction of precision might be acceptable, but it must happen in a controlled way (i.e. I must be able to set a bound on how many digits must be kept)</p>
  
  <p>I am working with some large data files which are series of correlated <code>double</code>s, describing a function of time (i.e. the values are correlated).  I don't generally need the full <code>double</code> precision but I might need more than <code>float</code>.</p>
  
  <p>Since there are specialized lossless methods for images/audio, I was wondering if anything specialized exists for this situation.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Clarification:</strong>  I am looking for existing practical tools rather than a paper describing how to implement something like this.  Something comparable to gzip in speed would be excellent. </p>