Quasi-Newton methods: a new direction

  • Authors:
  • Philipp Hennig;Martin Kiefel

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Empirical Inference, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Tübingen, Germany;Department of Empirical Inference, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Tübingen, Germany

  • Venue:
  • The Journal of Machine Learning Research
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

Four decades after their invention, quasi-Newton methods are still state of the art in unconstrained numerical optimization. Although not usually interpreted thus, these are learning algorithms that fit a local quadratic approximation to the objective function. We show that many, including the most popular, quasi-Newton methods can be interpreted as approximations of Bayesian linear regression under varying prior assumptions. This new notion elucidates some shortcomings of classical algorithms, and lights the way to a novel nonparametric quasi-Newton method, which is able to make more efficient use of available information at computational cost similar to its predecessors.