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https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MATH-352?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:all-tabpanel
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Luc Maisonobe resolved MATH-352.
--------------------------------
Resolution: Fixed
Fixed in subversion repository as of r951864.
A setQRRankingThreshold has been added as proposed in
[http://markmail.org/message/p2j76cnwsyehl7u6].
Thanks for reporting the issue.
> Jacobian rank determination in LevenbergMarquardtOptimizer is not numerically
> robust
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Key: MATH-352
> URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MATH-352
> Project: Commons Math
> Issue Type: Bug
> Affects Versions: 2.0
> Environment: commons-math 2.0
> Reporter: Gene Gorokhovsky
> Priority: Critical
> Fix For: 2.2
>
>
> LevenbergMarquardtOptimizer is designed to handle singular jacobians, i.e.
> situations when some of the fitted parameters depend on each other. The check
> for that condition is in LevenbergMarquardtOptimizer.qrDecomposition uses
> precise comparison to 0.
> if (ak2 == 0 ) {
> rank = k;
> return;
> }
> A correct check would be comparison with a small epsilon. Hard coded
> 2.2204e-16 is used elsewhere in the same file for similar purpose.
> final double QR_RANK_EPS = Math.ulp(1d); //2.220446049250313E-16
> ....
> if (ak2 < QR_RANK_EPS) {
> rank = k;
> return;
> }
> Current exact equality check is not tolerant of the real world poorly
> conditioned situations. For example I am trying to fit a cylinder into sample
> 3d points. Although theoretically cylinder has only 5 independent variables,
> derivatives for optimizing function (signed distance) for such minimal
> parametrization are complicated and it it much easier to work with a 7
> variable parametrization (3 for axis direction, 3 for axis origin and 1 for
> radius). This naturally results in rank-deficient jacobian, but because of
> the numeric errors the actual ak2 values for the dependent rows ( I am seeing
> values of 1e-18 and less), rank handling code does not kick in.
> Keeping these tiny values around then leads to huge corrections for the
> corresponding very slowly changing parameters, and consequently to numeric
> errors and instabilities. I have noticed the problem because tiny shift in
> the initial guess (on the order of 1e-12 in the axis component and origins)
> resulted in significantly different finally converged answers (origins and
> radii differing by as much as 0.02) which I tracked to loss of precision due
> to numeric error with root cause described above.
> Providing a cutoff as suggested fixes the issue. After the fix, small
> perturbations in the initial guess had practically no effect to the converged
> result - as expected from a robust algorithm.
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