Two Modified Single-Parameter Scaling Broyden–Fletcher–Goldfarb–Shanno Algorithms for Solving Nonlinear System of Symmetric Equations

In this paper, we develop two algorithms to solve a nonlinear system of symmetric equations. The first is an algorithm based on modifying two Broyden–Fletcher–Goldfarb–Shanno (BFGS) methods. One of its advantages is that it is more suitable to effectively solve a small-scale system of nonlinear symmetric equations. In contrast, the second algorithm chooses new search directions by incorporating an approximation method of computing the gradients and their difference into the determination of search directions in the first algorithm. In essence, the second one can be viewed as an extension of the conjugate gradient method recently proposed by Lv et al. for solving unconstrained optimization problems. It was proved that these search directions are sufficiently descending for the approximate residual square of the equations, independent of the used line search rules. Global convergence of the two algorithms is established under mild assumptions. To test the algorithms, they are used to solve a number of benchmark test problems. Numerical results indicate that the developed algorithms in this paper outperform the other similar algorithms available in the literature.