Nonlinear Least Squares
Dakota’s least squares branch currently contains three methods for solving nonlinear least squares problems:
NL2SOL, a trust-region method that adaptively chooses between two Hessian approximations (Gauss-Newton and Gauss-Newton plus a quasi-Newton approximation to the rest of the Hessian)
NLSSOL, a sequential quadratic programming (SQP) approach that is from the same algorithm family as NPSOL
Gauss-Newton, which supplies the Gauss-Newton Hessian approximation to the full-Newton optimizers from OPT++.
The important difference of these algorithms from general-purpose optimization methods is that the response set is defined by calibration terms (e.g. separate terms for each residual), rather than an objective function. Thus, a finer granularity of data is used by least squares solvers as compared to that used by optimizers. This allows the exploitation of the special structure provided by a sum of squares objective function.
