On Wed, 7 Sep 2005, Clark Allan wrote: > > $MLE$message > [1] "ERROR: ABNORMAL_TERMINATION_IN_LNSRCH" > > > WHAT DOES THIS ERROR MESSAGE MEAN??? >
Looking at the code in optim() a little, it looks as though this error comes when the optimiser tries to do a line search in the steepest descent direction and finds that the derivative along this line is positive, which is impossible. I have seen this when the gradient is wrong, and I suppose it could also happen with numerical gradients when the surface is nearly flat or the problem is very badly scaled. Eg, using the functions in example(optim) and making the gradient wrong: > optim(c(-1.2, 1), fr, function(theta) grr(theta)+1, method = "L-BFGS-B") $par [1] 0.25034245 0.05769649 $value [1] 0.5644614 $counts function gradient 96 96 $convergence [1] 52 $message [1] "ERROR: ABNORMAL_TERMINATION_IN_LNSRCH" -thomas ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html