R help - Sep 1999 - nlm recursion problem

Hi

I am trying to use nlm with an additional call to nlm within the function
but after the first pass, the parameters to the outer call are being
passed to the inner call.  The inner call is a very trivial problem.

ie:

test.outer<-function(param.outer){
  slope<-nlm(test.inner,param.inner)
 ...
  loglikelihood<-sum(...)
return(-loglikelihood)
}

and

nlm(test.outer,param.outer)

on the second call of test.outer by nlm, the inner calls to test.inner are
finding param.outer.

I have tried the obvious nlmx<-nlm and calling nlmx as the inner call but
this does not fix it.  Can I use recursion with nlm or is there an
alternative non-linear minimiser?  I suspect that it is the static memory
within the Fortran - is there any way of copying this to an object after
the outer call then restoring it after the inner calls?

nlm is called by many functions and packages so perhaps this is quite a
common problem - what is the slickest way round it?  The solution required
is just the intercept and slope of a line where there may be censored data
so lm() won't do and neither will optimise() (it is only for 1 dimension
and I require 2).

John

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John Logsdon <j.logsdon at lancaster.ac.uk> writes:
> nlm is called by many functions and packages so perhaps this is quite a
> common problem - what is the slickest way round it?  The solution required
> is just the intercept and slope of a line where there may be censored data
> so lm() won't do and neither will optimise() (it is only for 1
dimension
> and I require 2).
There really is no way around this, except either to rewrite the
maximiser in a language that allows reentrancy ( = C in practice) or
wait for someone to write a Fortran compiler that does. We've
previously done this for the solvers, and nlm appears to be under
scrutiny at the moment anyway, so perhaps...

-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     2200 Cph. N   
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