Speaker:   Andrew R. Conn
  Thomas J. Watson Research Center, IBM


Title: Derivative free optimization
Presentation Slides


In this talk I will explore an algorithm for optimizing a nonlinear function, without constraints, whose first order derivatives exist but are unavailable. The algorithm is based on approximating the objective function using the so-called support vector machine model and using this model within a trust-region framework. I will present some practical and theoretical properties of the algorithm and compare it with some of our earlier work in this area.