searchMinimizer: Minimize a criterion function

Description Usage Arguments Details Value Author(s) See Also Examples

View source: R/qsOpt.R

Description

The function either searches for a root of the quasi-score or minimizes one of the criterion functions.

Usage

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searchMinimizer(x0, qsd, method = c("qscoring", "bobyqa", "direct"),
  opts = list(), control = list(), ..., obs = NULL, info = TRUE,
  check = TRUE, restart = TRUE, pl = 0L, verbose = FALSE)

Arguments

x0

(named) numeric vector, the starting point

qsd

object of class QLmodel

method

names of possible minimization routines (see details)

opts

list of control arguments for quasi-scoring iteration, see qscoring

control

list of control arguments passed to the auxiliary routines

...

further arguments passed to covarTx

obs

numeric vector of observed statistics, overwrites 'qsd$obs'

info

additional information at found minimizer

check

logical, TRUE (default), whether to check input arguments

restart

logical, TRUE (default), whether to restart optimization in case of non convergence

pl

numeric value (>=0), the print level

verbose

if TRUE (default), print intermediate output

Details

The function provides an interface to local and global numerical minimization routines using the approximate quasi-deviance (QD) or Mahalanobis distance (MD) as an objective (monitor) function.

The function does not require additional simulations to find an approximate minimizer or root of the quasi-score. The numerical iterations always take place on the fast to evaluate criterion function approximations. The main purpose is to provide an entry point for minimization without the need of sampling new candidate points for evaluation. This is particularly useful if we search for a "first-shot" minimizer or to re-iterate a few further steps after estimation of the model parameter.

The criterion function is treated as a deterministic (non-random) function during minimization (or root finding) whose surface depends on the sample points and chosen covariance models. Because of the typical nonconvex nature of the criterion functions one cannot expect a global minimizer by applying any local search method like, for example, the scoring iteration qscoring. Therfore, if the quasi-scoring iteration or some other available method gets stuck in a local minimum of the criterion function showing at least some kind of numerical convergence we use such minimizer as it is and finish the search, possibly being unlucky, having not found an approximate root of the quasi-score vector (or minimum of the Mahalanobis distance). If there is no obvious convergence or any error, the search is restarted by switching to the next user supplied minimization routine defined in the vector of method names 'method'.

Choice of local minimization routines

Besides the quasi-scoring method, 'method' equal to "qscoring", the following (derivative-free) routines from the nloptr package are available for minimizing both criterion functions:

Using quasi-scoring first, which is only valid for minimizing the QD, is always a good idea since we might have done a good guess already being close to an approximate root. If this fails we switch to any of the above alternative methods (e.g. bobyqa as the default method) or eventually - in some real hard situations - to the method 'direct', if given, or its locally biased version 'directL'. The order of processing is determined by the order of appearance of the names in the argument 'method'. Any method available from package 'nloptr' can be chosen. In particular, setting method="nloptr" and defining 'control' in an appropriate way allows to choose a multistart algorithm such as mlsl, see also multiSearch for an alternative solution.

Only if there are reasonable arguments against quasi-scoring, such as expecting local minima rather than a root first or an available limited computational budget, we can always apply the direct search method 'direct' leading to a globally exhaustive search. Note that we must always supply a starting point 'x0', which could be any vector valued parameter of the parameter space unless method 'direct' is chosen. Then 'x0' is still required but ignored as a starting point since it uses the "center point" of the (hyper)box constraints internally. In addition, if cross-validation models 'cvm' are given, the cross-validation prediction variances are inherently used during consecutive iterations of all methods. This results in additional computational efforts due to the repeated evaluations of the statistics to calculate these variances during each new iteration.

Value

A list as follows

par

solution vector

value

objective value

method

applied method

convergence

termination code

score

if applicable, quasi-score vector (or gradient of MD)

Author(s)

M. Baaske

See Also

nloptr, qscoring, multiSearch

Examples

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data(normal)
searchMinimizer(c("mu"=2.5,"sd"=0.2),qsd,method=c("qscoring","bobyqa"),verbose=TRUE) 

qle documentation built on May 2, 2019, 9:55 a.m.