help-gsl
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: [Help-gsl] Doing multimin, but my error gets coverted to GSL_EFAILED


From: Tuomo Keskitalo
Subject: Re: [Help-gsl] Doing multimin, but my error gets coverted to GSL_EFAILED
Date: Sun, 09 Feb 2014 18:07:11 +0200
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/24.2.0

Hello,

yes, it is a bad design originating from the early years. Multimin should be changed to use error codes as return values. And add an option for constrained optimization.

BTW, you might also consider using an additional cost function to steer clear of illegal values.

BR,
Tuomo

On 02/08/2014 04:29 AM, Patrick Alken wrote:
I'm not sure why the multimin functions were set up that way (to return
nan on errors instead of an error code). The multifit framework returns
error codes, so there's something inconsistent there.

Maybe Brian or Tuomo could weigh in since they appear to have written
that code.

In any case, for your problem you could look for the GSL_EFAILED return
value and assume that problem originated in your function. The only
other option I see is to set a global variable in your function.

On 02/07/2014 04:43 PM, Leek, Jim wrote:
I do get an error code out, GSL_EFAILED.  I'm not really sure what's going on, 
but I think:
nmsimplex_iterate calls:
     contract_by_best calls eval
       gets Nan.
       calls gsl_finite
       sets  status = GSL_EBADFUNC;
       returns
     if (status != GSL_SUCCESS) GSL_ERROR ("contraction failed", GSL_EFAILED);

In short, iterate gets the Nan, throws EBADFUNC, then gets EBADFUNC and throws 
EFAILED.

So, obviously I misunderstood the error handing mechanism.  I assumed it was 
passed via a static variable like errno, But I guess I need to set an error 
handler if I want to properly save the error?  It seems to me that in that case 
it would still get overwritten by nmsimplex_iterate and contract_by_best....

Jim
________________________________________
From: address@hidden address@hidden on behalf of Patrick Alken address@hidden
Sent: Friday, February 07, 2014 3:02 PM
To: address@hidden
Subject: Re: [Help-gsl] Doing multimin, but my error gets coverted to 
GSL_EFAILED

The macro GSL_ERROR_VAL is defined as:

112 #define GSL_ERROR_VAL(reason, gsl_errno, value) \
113        do { \
114        gsl_error (reason, __FILE__, __LINE__, gsl_errno) ; \
115        return value ; \
116        } while (0)

Since the error handler is turned off, the gsl_error() call in the macro
does nothing and your GSL_ERANGE flag is lost. However, the
multimin_fminimizer_iterate() should still return an error code when it
gets the GSL_NAN so can you check what code is being returned?

On 02/07/2014 03:29 PM, Leek, Jim wrote:
Hi, I'm pretty new to GSL, but I should've started using it earlier.

Anyway, I've got a case where I'm doing a simple 2D optimization with 
gsl_multimin_fminimizer_nmsimplex2 .  One of the error conditions is that the 
optimizer might stray out of the valid range.  So, for that case I put in this 
error in the 2D function:

    if(v1 < vmin || v1 > vmax ||
       v2 < vmin || v2 > vmax) {
      GSL_ERROR_VAL("Optimization has spread outsize the bounds",
                    GSL_ERANGE, GSL_NAN);
    }

This part seems to work, if I have the default error handler on, the program 
crashes out with the proper error.  But in my case this is actually a 
recoverable error, I want to be able to handle it.  So, I turn off the error 
handler:   gsl_set_error_handler_off();

Then I have this in the iteration loop:
    do {
      status = gsl_multimin_fminimizer_iterate(s);
      if (status)
        break;
      ....[snip]....
    }
    while (status == GSL_CONTINUE && iter < 1000);

    if(status != GSL_SUCCESS) {
      //If we slid out of range, just skip this optimization, it's out of 
bounds.
      if(status == GSL_ERANGE) {
        return 0;
      } else {
        exit(status);
      }
    }

The check against GSL_ERANGE doesn't work, because the status returned turns 
out to be GSL_EFAILED.  So, no matter how I fail, I get the same error code 
GSL_EFAILED.  I think it's due to this line in multimin/simplex2.c :

line 522:
        if (status != GSL_SUCCESS)
          {
            GSL_ERROR ("contraction failed", GSL_EFAILED);
          }

So, simplex2 just eats my error code.  This seems like a bug to me.  Is this 
intentional?  It doesn't seem hard to fix.

Note, I'm using gsl 1.13 because that's what's installed on my machine, but 
simplex2.c in gsl 1.16 is exactly the same file, so I don't think this 
behaviour has changed.

Thanks,
Jim







--
address@hidden
http://iki.fi/tuomo.keskitalo



reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]