Thanks for the functions!
I tried installing the multimin function. To get it to compile, I needed
to change the Makefile to reflect my path and by adding the flags fPIC
in response to the error: "/usr/bin/ld: vector.o: relocation R_X86_64_32
against `a local symbol' can not be used when making a shared object;
recompile with -fPIC"
However, I get the following running test.R:
Error in dyn.load(x, as.logical(local), as.logical(now)) :
unable to load shared library '/home/mmorales/Desktop/multimin/gsl.so':
/usr/lib64/libgsl.so.0: undefined symbol: cblas_ctrmv
I'm running R-2.5.1 compiled for x86_64 with a custom built ATLAS.
Manuel
On Sat, 2007-08-04 at 09:25 -0400, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
> On 04/08/2007 1:12 AM, Andrew Clausen wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I've been working on improving R's optim() command, which does general
> > purpose
> > unconstrained optimization. Obviously, this is important for many
> > statistics
> > computations, such as maximum likelihood, method of moments, etc. I have
> > focused my efforts of the BFGS method, mainly because it best matches my
> > current projects.
> >
> > Here's a quick summary of what I've done:
> > * implemented my own version of BFGS in R,
> > http://www.econ.upenn.edu/~clausen/computing/bfgs.zip
> > * written a wrapper for the GNU Scientific Library's optimization function,
> > multimin(),
> > http://www.econ.upenn.edu/~clausen/computing/multimin.zip
> > * written some tricky functions to compare implementations,
> > http://www.econ.upenn.edu/~clausen/computing/tests.zip
> >
> > My own implementation has several advantages over optim()'s implementation
> > (which you can see in the vmmin() function in
> > https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/src/main/optim.c)
> > * the linesearch algorithm (More-Thuente) quickly finds a region of
> > interest
> > to zoom into. Moreover, it strikes a much better balance between finding
> > a point that adequately improves upon the old point, but doesn't waste too
> > much time finding a much better point. (Unlike optim(), it uses the
> > standard
> > Wolfe conditions with weak parameters.)
> > * the linesearch algorithm uses interpolation, so it finds an acceptable
> > point more quickly.
> > * implements "box" constraints.
> > * easier to understand and modify the code, partly because it's written in
> > R.
> >
> > Of course, this comes at the (slight?) overhead cost of being written in R.
> >
> > The test suite above takes the first few functions from the paper
> >
> > Moré, Garbow, and Hillstrom, "Testing Unconstrained
> > Optimization Software", ACM Trans Math Softw 7:1 (March 1981)
> >
> > The test results appear below, where "*" means "computed the right
> > solution",
> > and "!" means "got stuck".
> >
> > test optim clausen gsl
> > --------------------------------------------------------------
> > bard !
> > beale
> > brown-scaled
> > freudenstein-roth
> > gaussian *
> > helical-valley * *
> > jennrich-sampson *
> > meyer *
> > powell-scaled *
> > rosenbrock *
> >
> > The table indiciates that all three implementations of BFGS failed to
> > compute
> > the right answer in most cases. I suppose this means they are all quite
> > deficient. Of course, this doesn't imply that they perform badly on real
> > statistics problems -- but in my limited experience with my crude
> > econometric
> > models, they do perform badly. Indeed, that's why I started investigating
> > in
> > the first place.
> >
> > For what it's worth, I think:
> > * the optimization algorithms should be written in R -- the overhead is
> > small compared to the cost of evaluating likelihood functions anyway, and is
> > easily made up by the better algorithms that are possible.
> > * it would be useful to keep a repository of interesting optimization
> > problems relevant to R users. Then R developers can evaluate
> > "improvements".
>
> This is interesting work; thanks for doing it. Could I make a
> suggestion? Why not put together a package containing those test
> optimization problems, and offer to include other interesting ones as
> they arise? You could also include your wrapper for the gsl function
> and your own improvements to optim.
>
> On your first point: I agree that a prototype implementation in R makes
> sense, but I suspect there exist problems where the overhead would not
> be negligible (e.g. ones where the user has written the objective
> function in C for speed). So I think you should keep in mind the
> possibility of moving the core of your improvements to C once you are
> happy with them.
>
> Duncan Murdoch
>
> P.S. I dropped the help-gsl mailing list from the distribution, since my
> post is mainly about R.
>
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