Mathematics

Tips

Optimization problems may take many iterations to converge. Most optimization problems benefit from good starting guesses. Providing good starting guesses improves the execution efficiency and may help locate the global minimum instead of a local minimum.

Sophisticated problems are best solved by an evolutionary approach, whereby a problem with a smaller number of independent variables is solved first. Solutions from lower order problems can generally be used as starting points for higher order problems by using an appropriate mapping.

The use of simpler cost functions and less stringent termination criteria in the early stages of an optimization problem can also reduce computation time. Such an approach often produces superior results by avoiding local minima.

Finding Zeros of Functions

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