Conditioning of quasi-Newton methods for function minimization

Quasi-Newton methods accelerate the steepest-descent technique for function minimization by using computational history to generate a sequence of approximations to the inverse of the Hessian matrix. This paper presents a class of approximating matrices as a function of a scalar parameter. The problem of optimal conditioning of these matrices under an appropriate norm as a function of the scalar parameter is investigated. A set of computational results verifies the superiority of the new methods arising from conditioning considerations to known methods.