Introduction When fitting a nonlinear regression model in R with nls(), the first step is to select an appropriate regression model to fit the observed data, the second step is to find reasonable starting values for the model parameters in order to initialize the nonlinear least-squares (NLS) algorithm.
Introduction Solving a nonlinear least squares problem consists of minimizing a least squares objective function made up of residuals \(g_1(\boldsymbol{\theta}), \ldots, g_n(\boldsymbol{\theta})\) that are nonlinear functions of the parameters of interest \(\boldsymbol{\theta} = (\theta_1,\ldots, \theta_p)'\):
Introduction Automatic differentiation Automatic differentiation (AD) refers to the automatic/algorithmic calculation of derivatives of a function defined as a computer program by repeated application of the chain rule. Automatic differentiation plays an important role in many statistical computing problems, such as gradient-based optimization of large-scale models, where gradient calculation by means of numeric differentiation (i.
Introduction The new gslnls-package provides R bindings to nonlinear least-squares optimization with the GNU Scientific Library (GSL) using the trust region methods implemented by the gsl_multifit_nlinear module. The gsl_multifit_nlinear module was added in GSL version 2.