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      1 /*
      2  * Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
      3  * contributor license agreements.  See the NOTICE file distributed with
      4  * this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership.
      5  * The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0
      6  * (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with
      7  * the License.  You may obtain a copy of the License at
      8  *
      9  *      http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
     10  *
     11  * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
     12  * distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
     13  * WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
     14  * See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
     15  * limitations under the License.
     16  */
     17 
     18 package org.apache.commons.math.optimization.general;
     19 
     20 import org.apache.commons.math.FunctionEvaluationException;
     21 
     22 /**
     23  * This interface represents a preconditioner for differentiable scalar
     24  * objective function optimizers.
     25  * @version $Revision: 1073158 $ $Date: 2011-02-21 22:46:52 +0100 (lun. 21 fvr. 2011) $
     26  * @since 2.0
     27  */
     28 public interface Preconditioner {
     29 
     30     /**
     31      * Precondition a search direction.
     32      * <p>
     33      * The returned preconditioned search direction must be computed fast or
     34      * the algorithm performances will drop drastically. A classical approach
     35      * is to compute only the diagonal elements of the hessian and to divide
     36      * the raw search direction by these elements if they are all positive.
     37      * If at least one of them is negative, it is safer to return a clone of
     38      * the raw search direction as if the hessian was the identity matrix. The
     39      * rationale for this simplified choice is that a negative diagonal element
     40      * means the current point is far from the optimum and preconditioning will
     41      * not be efficient anyway in this case.
     42      * </p>
     43      * @param point current point at which the search direction was computed
     44      * @param r raw search direction (i.e. opposite of the gradient)
     45      * @return approximation of H<sup>-1</sup>r where H is the objective function hessian
     46      * @exception FunctionEvaluationException if no cost can be computed for the parameters
     47      * @exception IllegalArgumentException if point dimension is wrong
     48      */
     49     double[] precondition(double[] point, double[] r)
     50         throws FunctionEvaluationException, IllegalArgumentException;
     51 
     52 }
     53