ON THE CONVERGENCE OF THE UOBYQA METHOD

We analyze the convergence properties of Powell's UOBYQA method. A distinguished feature of the method is its use of two trust region radii. We first study the convergence of the method when the objective function is quadratic. We then prove that it is globally convergent for general objective functions when the second trust region radius p converges to zero. This gives a justification for the use of p as a stopping criterion. Finally, we show that a variant of this method is superlinearly convergent when the objective function is strictly convex at the solution.