BUG: `pd.testing.assert_series_equal` break in version 2.2.0rc0

[shobsi]

Pandas version checks

• I have checked that this issue has not already been reported.

• I have confirmed this bug exists on the latest version of pandas.

• I have confirmed this bug exists on the main branch of pandas.

Reproducible Example

>>> import pandas as pd
>>> pd.__version__
'2.2.0rc0'
>>> left = pd.Series([81, 18, 121, 38, 74, 72, 81, 81, 146, 81, 81, 170, 74, 74])
>>> right = pd.Series([72,  9, 72, 72, 72, 72, 72, 72, 72, 72, 72, 72, 72, 72])
>>> pd.testing.assert_series_equal(left, right, rtol=1.5)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/local/google/home/shobs/code/bigframes/.nox/system_prerelease/lib/python3.11/site-packages/pandas/_testing/asserters.py", line 951, in assert_series_equal
    assert_numpy_array_equal(
  File "/usr/local/google/home/shobs/code/bigframes/.nox/system_prerelease/lib/python3.11/site-packages/pandas/_testing/asserters.py", line 688, in assert_numpy_array_equal
    _raise(left, right, err_msg)
  File "/usr/local/google/home/shobs/code/bigframes/.nox/system_prerelease/lib/python3.11/site-packages/pandas/_testing/asserters.py", line 682, in _raise
    raise_assert_detail(obj, msg, left, right, index_values=index_values)
  File "/usr/local/google/home/shobs/code/bigframes/.nox/system_prerelease/lib/python3.11/site-packages/pandas/_testing/asserters.py", line 612, in raise_assert_detail
    raise AssertionError(msg)
AssertionError: Series are different

Series values are different (92.85714 %)
[index]: [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13]
[left]:  [81, 18, 121, 38, 74, 72, 81, 81, 146, 81, 81, 170, 74, 74]
[right]: [72, 9, 72, 72, 72, 72, 72, 72, 72, 72, 72, 72, 72, 72]

Issue Description

bigframes has prerelease tests that test integration with pandas by installing the latest pandas from conda forge:

pip install --extra-index-url https://pypi.anaconda.org/scipy-wheels-nightly/simple --prefer-binary --pre --upgrade pandas

The tests are failing since yesterday (12/26/2023).

Expected Behavior

With pandas version 2.1.4 it is passing

>>> import pandas as pd
>>> pd.__version__
'2.1.4'
>>> left = pd.Series([81, 18, 121, 38, 74, 72, 81, 81, 146, 81, 81, 170, 74, 74])
>>> right = pd.Series([72,  9, 72, 72, 72, 72, 72, 72, 72, 72, 72, 72, 72, 72])
>>> pd.testing.assert_series_equal(left, right, rtol=1.5)
>>>

Installed Versions

INSTALLED VERSIONS

commit : d4c8d82
python : 3.11.4.final.0
python-bits : 64
OS : Linux
OS-release : 6.5.13-1rodete1-amd64
Version : #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Debian 6.5.13-1rodete1 (2023-12-06)
machine : x86_64
processor :
byteorder : little
LC_ALL : None
LANG : en_US.UTF-8
LOCALE : en_US.UTF-8

pandas : 2.2.0rc0
numpy : 1.26.2
pytz : 2023.3.post1
dateutil : 2.8.2
setuptools : 69.0.2
pip : 23.3.1
Cython : None
pytest : 7.4.3
hypothesis : None
sphinx : None
blosc : None
feather : None
xlsxwriter : None
lxml.etree : None
html5lib : None
pymysql : None
psycopg2 : None
jinja2 : 3.1.2
IPython : 8.19.0
pandas_datareader : None
adbc-driver-postgresql: None
adbc-driver-sqlite : None
bs4 : None
bottleneck : None
dataframe-api-compat : None
fastparquet : None
fsspec : 2023.6.0
gcsfs : 2023.6.0
matplotlib : None
numba : None
numexpr : None
odfpy : None
openpyxl : 3.1.2
pandas_gbq : 0.20.0
pyarrow : 14.0.2
pyreadstat : None
python-calamine : None
pyxlsb : None
s3fs : None
scipy : 1.11.4
sqlalchemy : 2.0.23
tables : None
tabulate : 0.9.0
xarray : 2023.12.0
xlrd : None
zstandard : None
tzdata : 2023.3
qtpy : None
pyqt5 : None

[mroeschke]

cc @MarcoGorelli was it intentional that the tol arguments would be ignored along with check_exact?

[asishm]

looks intentional - #55934 (comment)

[MarcoGorelli]

thanks @shobsi for trying out the release candidate

yup, that's right, as @asishm says, it was intentional

I think this can be worked around faily easily in users' code, I'd rather have the testing code be as simple as possible

[phofl]

Hm there are actual use cases for this kind of behaviour if your are dealing with very large numbers and exact precision isn't super important

Defaulting check-exact to True seems fine but ignoring other arguments seems suspect

We definitely have to document this better if we decide that we want to keep this kind of behaviour

[lithomas1]

Yeah, I don't think we should silently ignore here - we should raise if we don't plan on supporting this.

[lithomas1]

@MarcoGorelli

Are you fine with reverting the change to ignore check_exact/rtol/atol arguments for int dtypes (and just have the default be True for integer dtypes)?

I don't think ignoring simplifies the testing code - I haven't worked with the testing code internals before, but I'm pretty sure ints/floats go through the same path in assert_almost_equalin pandas/_libs/testing.pyx anyways.

[MarcoGorelli]

to be honest I think the current behaviour is nice, and that inexact checking for integers is a rare-enough use-case that people can just implement it manually (like, assert (result - expected).abs().max() < a_tol)

no strong opinion though, so long as the integer case defaults to exact checking