PDFO: A Cross-Platform Package for Powell's Derivative-Free Optimization Solvers

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ragonneau, Tom M., Zhang, Zaikun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Ragonneau, Tom M.
Zhang, Zaikun
author_facet Ragonneau, Tom M.
Zhang, Zaikun
contents The late Professor M. J. D. Powell devised five trust-region methods for derivative-free optimization, namely COBYLA, UOBYQA, NEWUOA, BOBYQA, and LINCOA. He carefully implemented them into publicly available solvers, renowned for their robustness and efficiency. However, the solvers were implemented in Fortran 77 and hence may not be easily accessible to some users. We introduce the PDFO package, which provides user-friendly Python and MATLAB interfaces to Powell's code. With PDFO, users of such languages can call Powell's Fortran solvers easily without dealing with the Fortran code. Moreover, PDFO includes bug fixes and improvements, which are particularly important for handling problems that suffer from ill-conditioning or failures of function evaluations. In addition to the PDFO package, we provide an overview of Powell's methods, sketching them from a uniform perspective, summarizing their main features, and highlighting the similarities and interconnections among them. We also present experiments on PDFO to demonstrate its stability under noise, tolerance of failures in function evaluations, and potential to solve certain hyperparameter optimization problems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2302_13246
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PDFO: A Cross-Platform Package for Powell's Derivative-Free Optimization Solvers
Ragonneau, Tom M.
Zhang, Zaikun
Optimization and Control
65K05, 90C30, 90C56, 90-04
The late Professor M. J. D. Powell devised five trust-region methods for derivative-free optimization, namely COBYLA, UOBYQA, NEWUOA, BOBYQA, and LINCOA. He carefully implemented them into publicly available solvers, renowned for their robustness and efficiency. However, the solvers were implemented in Fortran 77 and hence may not be easily accessible to some users. We introduce the PDFO package, which provides user-friendly Python and MATLAB interfaces to Powell's code. With PDFO, users of such languages can call Powell's Fortran solvers easily without dealing with the Fortran code. Moreover, PDFO includes bug fixes and improvements, which are particularly important for handling problems that suffer from ill-conditioning or failures of function evaluations. In addition to the PDFO package, we provide an overview of Powell's methods, sketching them from a uniform perspective, summarizing their main features, and highlighting the similarities and interconnections among them. We also present experiments on PDFO to demonstrate its stability under noise, tolerance of failures in function evaluations, and potential to solve certain hyperparameter optimization problems.
title PDFO: A Cross-Platform Package for Powell's Derivative-Free Optimization Solvers
topic Optimization and Control
65K05, 90C30, 90C56, 90-04
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.13246