Home/ Questions/Q 6053871
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-23T08:05:21+00:00

I’m looking for a library in C that will do optimization of an objective

  • 0

I’m looking for a library in C that will do optimization of an objective function (preferrably Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm) and will support box constraints, linear inequality constraints and non-linear inequality constraints.

I’ve tried several libraries already, but none of them do employ the necessary constraint types for my application:

  • GNU GSL (does not support constraints at all)
  • cMPFIT (only supports box constraints)
  • levmar (does not support non-linear constraints at all)

I am currently exploring NLopt, but I’m not sure if I can achieve a least-squares approach with any of the supplied algorithms.

I find it hard to believe that there’s not a single library supporting the full range of constraints in this problem, so I guess I did a mistake somewhere while googling.

I recently discovered I can call Matlab functions from C. While that would solve the problem quite easily, I don’t want to have to call Matlab functions from C. It’s not fast in my experience.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The approach I finally followed is the following:

    • I used NLopt for the optimization and the objective function was constructed to compute the squared error of the problem.

    • The algorithm that showed the most promising results was COBYLA (Local derivative-free optimization). It supports box constraints and non-linear constraints. The linear inequity constraints were introduced as non-linear constraints, which should be generally feasible.

    Simple benchmarking shows that it does converge a little slower than a Lev-Mar approach, but speed is sacrificed due to the need for constraints.

    • 0