ABSTRACT
As seen in Chapter 2 a suitable measure of the discrepancy between a model and a set of data is the objective function, S(k), and hence, the parameter values are obtained by minimizing this function. Therefore, the estimation of the parameters can be viewed as an optimization problem whereby any of the available general purpose optimization methods can be utilized. In particular, it was found that the Gauss-Newton method is the most efficient method for estimating parameters in nonlinear models (Bard, 1970). As we strongly believe that this is indeed the best method to use for nonlinear regression problems, the Gauss-Newton method is presented in detail in this chapter. It is assumed that the parameters are free to take any values.
