Description Usage Arguments Details Value Author(s) See Also Examples
The function searches for a root of the quasi-score vector or minimizes one of the criterion functions.
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x0 |
(named) numeric vector, the starting point |
qsd |
object of class |
method |
names of possible minimization routines (see details) |
opts |
list of control arguments for quasi-scoring iteration, see |
control |
list of control arguments passed to the auxiliary routines |
... |
further arguments passed to |
obs |
numeric vector of observed statistics, overwrites ' |
info |
additional information at found minimizer |
check |
logical, |
pl |
numeric value (>=0), the print level |
verbose |
if |
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 function.
The function does not require additional simulations to find an approximate minimizer or root. 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.
The criterion function is treated as a deterministic (non-random) function during minimization
(or root finding) whose surface depends on the sample points. 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 scoring iteration or some other available method gets stuck in a possibly 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 convergence practically,
the search is restarted by switching to the next user supplied minimization routine defined in 'method
'.
Besides the local quasi-scoring (QS) iteration, 'method
' equal to "qscoring
", the following
(derivative-free) auxiliary methods from the nloptr
package are available for minimizing
both criterion functions:
bobyqa
, cobyla
and neldermead
direct
, global search with a locally biased version named directL
lbfgs
, for minimizing the MD with constant 'Sigma
' only
nloptr
, as the general optimizer, which allows to use further methods
Using quasi-scoring first, which is only valid for minimizing the QD function, is always a good idea since we might have done
a good guess already being close to an approximate root. If it 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
' 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 'control
' allows to choose a multistart algorithm such
as mlsl
.
Only if there are reasonable arguments against quasi-scoring, such as expecting a local
minimum 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 CV models 'cvm
' are given, the CV based 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.
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) |
M. Baaske
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