Calc solvers - what to say in the Calc Guide

[Stephen Fanning]

Kohei and Drew,

Many thanks for getting back to me on this topic.

For the 6.4 update to the Calc Guide, I will follow Kohei's advice that it
is probably beyond the scope of the document to provide guidance on how to
select a solver.

I'll try to make some time before the 7.0 Calc Guide update to re-visit
this decision.

Regards,

Steve


On Fri, 15 May 2020 at 07:40, Drew Jensen <drewjensen.inbox at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Tonight took the LO 7 alpha1 file and the one example workbook from that
> Excel tutorial and ran each of the five solver engines.
> For sure the LO CoinMP and LO Linear choices are crazy faster then DEPS
> and SCO (The firth choice Swarm non-linear is just as quick but the results
> are kaka, but it does say it is experimental).
>
> On Thu, May 14, 2020 at 7:55 PM Drew Jensen <drewjensen.inbox at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> hmm - there are bits and pieces here and there.
>>
>> For example the first two choices (DEPS & SCO) have some explanation over
>> at AOO wiki
>> https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/NLPSolver
>> If that is still relevant for LibreOffice I can't say, but likely.
>> CoinMD (which I assume here is type of Coin-MP) has a lot of generalized
>> references, even a wiki page with a paragraph or two that might be worth
>> drafting for service here:
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COIN-OR
>>
>> anyway - I'm just using DDG to search for info on the different solver
>> types, and you get the idea.
>>
>> There is a couple of examples of tutorials the reference solvers in Calc
>> (one of which actually uses the same example data to show how to solve both
>> in Excel and Calc), but the couple I reviewed only use one as an example.
>>
>> I did find one for Excel that has an over view which I thought was a
>> decent balance of information on the three solver models available there at:
>>
>> https://www.tutorialspoint.com/excel_data_analysis/advanced_data_analysis_optimization_with_excel_solver.htm
>>
>> IDK if any of the helps, hope it does.
>>
>> Best wishes,
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Thu, May 14, 2020 at 7:19 PM Kohei Yoshida <kohei at libreoffice.org>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> On 10.05.2020 10:59, Stephen Fanning wrote:
>>>
>>> > What guidance can I insert into the Calc Guide to help the user if he
>>> > wonders which algorithm to select?
>>>
>>> This is strictly my personal opinion.
>>>
>>> Which optimization solver to pick really depends on the characteristics
>>> of the data being optimized, how (well) the algorithm is implemented in
>>> the versions included in Calc, the accuracy goal etc. etc.  It's more an
>>> art than science, and each user really needs to experiment with various
>>> solvers to see which one works best for his or her optimization cases.
>>> My personal opinion is that it is probably beyond the scope of Calc user
>>> guide to provide any sort of guidance on how to select a solver.
>>>
>>> Feel free to disagree with me on this.  I'm not an expert. :-)
>>>
>>> Kohei
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> LibreOffice mailing list
>>> LibreOffice at lists.freedesktop.org
>>> https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libreoffice
>>>
>>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice/attachments/20200515/02793e96/attachment.htm>