Message-ID: <Pine.A41.4.63a.0509071647320.98910@homer03.u.washington.edu>
Date: 2005-09-07T23:55:14Z
From: Thomas Lumley
Subject: R: optim
In-Reply-To: <431ED7D6.192463D7@STATS.uct.ac.za>
On Wed, 7 Sep 2005, Clark Allan wrote:
>
> $MLE$message
> [1] "ERROR: ABNORMAL_TERMINATION_IN_LNSRCH"
>
>
> WHAT DOES THIS ERROR MESSAGE MEAN???
>
Looking at the code in optim() a little, it looks as though this error
comes when the optimiser tries to do a line search in the steepest descent
direction and finds that the derivative along this line is positive, which
is impossible.
I have seen this when the gradient is wrong, and I suppose it could also
happen with numerical gradients when the surface is nearly flat or the
problem is very badly scaled.
Eg, using the functions in example(optim) and making the gradient wrong:
> optim(c(-1.2, 1), fr, function(theta) grr(theta)+1, method =
"L-BFGS-B")
$par
[1] 0.25034245 0.05769649
$value
[1] 0.5644614
$counts
function gradient
96 96
$convergence
[1] 52
$message
[1] "ERROR: ABNORMAL_TERMINATION_IN_LNSRCH"
-thomas