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Noisy objective functions

More to provide another perspective, I'll give the citation of some work
with Harry Joe and myself from over 2 decades ago.

@Article{,
   author  = {Joe, Harry and Nash, John C.},
   title   = {Numerical optimization and surface estimation with imprecise function evaluations},
   journal = {Statistics and Computing},
   year    = {2003},
   volume  = {13},
   pages   = {277--286},
}

Essentially this fits a quadratic approximately by regression, assuming the returned
objective is imprecise. It is NOT good for high dimension, of course, and is bedeviled
by needing to have some idea of the scale of the imprecision i.e., the noise
amplitude. However, it does work for some applications. Harry had some success with
Monte Carlo evaluation of multidimensional integrals optimizing crude quadratures.
That is, multiple crude quadrature could be more efficient than single precise quadrature.
However, this approach is not one that can be blindly applied. There are all sorts
of issues about what point cloud to keep as the "fit model, move to model minimum,
add points, delete points" process evolves.


JN
On 2023-08-13 15:28, Hans W wrote: