A description of optimization measures would not be complete without
some mention of the method first suggested by Lagrange. In some circumstances
we require not only an optimal (maximum or minimum) of a statistical measure
but also that a set of contraints on the parameter set be true, ie
minimize subject to the constraint
.
One way of achieving this is to add an extra term to the minimization
cost function and the result is:
where are known as the Lagrange multipliers.
These techniques must be used with care as the last thing we would
wish to do is to trade off an arbitrary weighting of the inability to
satisfy a constraint against the statistical measure we know we should
be legitimately minimising. The optimization process is thus generally
constructed such that each
has reduced to zero by the
the end.
The Lagrange approach considerably complicates the estimation of additional
information such as covariances (described below) and a discussion
of these techniques is really beyond the scope of this tutorial.
The reader is directed instead to [13] and we will only
point out here that in many cases constraint equations can be satisfied
directly by careful formulation of the model parameterisation a.
For example, positive only parameters can be enforced by defining
a parameter
instead as
in the model.
Another example of such a process is the definition of a rotation matrix which has nine parameters but only three degrees of freedom. This can be represented instead as a quaternion
where r defines an axis of rotation and the rotation about that axis.
Only three of these parameters are defined for minimization
and the other calculated in order to satisfy