[Rd] Buglet in optim() SANN

[Prof. John C Nash]

Indeed Brian is correct about the functioning of SANN and the R
documentation. I'd misread the "maxit" warning. Things can stay as they
are for now.

The rest of this msg is for information and an invitation to off-list
discussion.

I realize my posting opens up the can of worms about what "convergence"
means. As someone who has occasionally published discussions on
convergence versus termination, I'd certainly prefer to set the
'convergence' flag to 1 for SANN, since we have only a termination at
the maximum number of function evaluations and not necessarily a result
that can be presumed to be "optim"al. Or perhaps put a note in the
description of the 'convergence' flag to indicate the potential
misinterpretation with SANN where results need the user to externally
check if they are likely to be usable as an optimum.

It may be better to call the non-zero results for "convergence" a
"termination indicator" rather than an "error code". Some related
packages like ucminf give more than one non-zero indicators for results
that are generally usable as optima. They are informational rather than
errors. Writing our optimx wrapper for a number of methods has forced us
to think about how such information is returned and reported through a
flag like "convergence". There are several choices and plenty of room
for confusion.

Right now a few of us are working on improvements for optimization, but
the first goal is to get things working OK for smooth, precisely defined
functions. However, we have been looking at methods like SANN for
multimodal and noisy (i.e., imprecisely defined) functions. For those
problems, knowing when you have an acceptable or usable result is never
easy.

Comments and exchanges welcome -- off-list of course.

Cheers, JN


Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
> As the posting guide says, please read the help carefully before
> posting.  It does say:
> 
>      ‘maxit’ The maximum number of iterations. Defaults to ‘100’ for
>           the derivative-based methods, and ‘500’ for ‘"Nelder-Mead"’.
>           For ‘"SANN"’ ‘maxit’ gives the total number of function
>           evaluations. There is no other stopping criterion.
>                        ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>           Defaults to ‘10000’.
> 
> so this is indicating 'successful convergence' as documented.
> 
> On Tue, 20 Oct 2009, Prof. John C Nash wrote:
> 
>> I think SANN method in optim() is failing to report that it has not
>> converged. Here is an example
>>
>> genrose.f<- function(x, gs=NULL){ # objective function
>> ## One generalization of the Rosenbrock banana valley function (n
>> parameters)
>>     n <- length(x)
>>        if(is.null(gs)) { gs=100.0 }
>>     fval<-1.0 + sum (gs*(x[1:(n-1)]^2 - x[2:n])^2 + (x[2:n] - 1)^2)
>>        return(fval)
>> }
>>
>> xx<-rep(pi,10)
>> test<-optim(xx,genrose.f,method="SANN",control=list(maxit=1000,trace=1))
>> print(test)
>>
>>
>> Output is:
>>
>>> source("tsann.R")
>> sann objective function values
>> initial       value 40781.805639
>> iter      999 value 29.969529
>> final         value 29.969529
>> sann stopped after 999 iterations
>> $par
>> [1] 1.0135254 0.9886862 1.1348609 1.0798927 1.0327997 1.1087146 1.1642130
>> [8] 1.3038754 1.8628391 3.7569285
>>
>> $value
>> [1] 29.96953
>>
>> $counts
>> function gradient
>>    1000       NA
>>
>> $convergence
>> [1] 0  <------ THIS SHOULD BE 1 ACCORDING TO THE DOCS
> 
> It _should_ be 0 according to the help page.
> 
>>
>> $message
>> NULL
>>
>> Note terribly important, but maybe fixable.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> John Nash
>>
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>