I am trying to minimize an objective function, J(θ), with respect to θ, a 19-dimensional parameter vector. J(θ) is a smooth nonlinear function so I have tried various gradient-based optimizers in R to find the solution. A consistent problem is that they all stop optimization early at a point which has a nonzero gradient. The reason for the stop is a "zero step from line search." For example, the code
ucminf(theta = paramGuess, fn = J_obj, control = list(maxeval = 1000, xtol = 1e-15, grtol = 1e-8, trace = 1))
will terminate with the following message:
Line search: alpha = 0.0000e+00, dphi(0) =-8.7877e-02, dphi(1) =-4.9128e-02
Optimization has converged. Stopped by zero step from line search
maxgradient laststep stepmax neval
488.2985428 0.0000000 0.4051687 22.0000000
As you'll notice, the gradient is far from zero. Optim has the same problem.
Is there a way I can control the minimum step size (alpha), so that the optimizer doesn't stop until the maximum element in the gradient is less than grtol?
I have also tried supplying an analytic gradient and this sometimes converges to a solution with a nonzero gradient depending on the initial parameter values. However, sometimes it doesn't, and the optimizer again stops because of "zero step from line search."
Any advice as to why the optimizer is setting the step size equal to zero and how I can prevent this from happening would be greatly appreciated!