Direct Search Methods for Nonsmooth Problems using Global Optimization Techniques

dc.contributor.authorRobertson, Blair Lennon
dc.date.accessioned2011-01-20T01:13:57Z
dc.date.available2011-01-20T01:13:57Z
dc.date.issued2010en
dc.description.abstractThis thesis considers the practical problem of constrained and unconstrained local optimization. This subject has been well studied when the objective function f is assumed to smooth. However, nonsmooth problems occur naturally and frequently in practice. Here f is assumed to be nonsmooth or discontinuous without forcing smoothness assumptions near, or at, a potential solution. Various methods have been presented by others to solve nonsmooth optimization problems, however only partial convergence results are possible for these methods. In this thesis, an optimization method which use a series of local and localized global optimization phases is proposed. The local phase searches for a local minimum and gives the methods numerical performance on parts of f which are smooth. The localized global phase exhaustively searches for points of descent in a neighborhood of cluster points. It is the localized global phase which provides strong theoretical convergence results on nonsmooth problems. Algorithms are presented for solving bound constrained, unconstrained and constrained nonlinear nonsmooth optimization problems. These algorithms use direct search methods in the local phase as they can be applied directly to nonsmooth problems because gradients are not explicitly required. The localized global optimization phase uses a new partitioning random search algorithm to direct random sampling into promising subsets of ℝⁿ. The partition is formed using classification and regression trees (CART) from statistical pattern recognition. The CART partition defines desirable subsets where f is relatively low, based on previous sampling, from which further samples are drawn directly. For each algorithm, convergence to an essential local minimizer of f is demonstrated under mild conditions. That is, a point x* for which the set of all feasible points with lower f values has Lebesgue measure zero for all sufficiently small neighborhoods of x*. Stopping rules are derived for each algorithm giving practical convergence to estimates of essential local minimizers. Numerical results are presented on a range of nonsmooth test problems for 2 to 10 dimensions showing the methods are effective in practice.en
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10092/5060
dc.identifier.urihttp://dx.doi.org/10.26021/3290
dc.language.isoen
dc.publisherUniversity of Canterbury. Mathematics and Statisticsen
dc.relation.isreferencedbyNZCUen
dc.rightsCopyright Blair Lennon Robertsonen
dc.rights.urihttps://canterbury.libguides.com/rights/thesesen
dc.subjectnonsmooth optimizationen
dc.subjectCARTen
dc.subjectCARTopten
dc.subjectdirect searchen
dc.subjectnumerical resultsen
dc.subjectrandom searchen
dc.subjectHooke and Jeevesen
dc.subjectfilter methoden
dc.titleDirect Search Methods for Nonsmooth Problems using Global Optimization Techniquesen
dc.typeTheses / Dissertations
thesis.degree.disciplineMathematicsen
thesis.degree.grantorUniversity of Canterburyen
thesis.degree.levelDoctoralen
thesis.degree.nameDoctor of Philosophyen
uc.bibnumber1491918en
uc.collegeFaculty of Engineeringen
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