The minimal-norm Gauss-Newton method and some of its regularized variants

Nonlinear least-squares problems appear in many real-world applications. When a nonlinear model is used to reproduce the behavior of a physical system, the unknown parameters of the model can be estimated by fitting experimental observations by a least-squares approach. It is common to solve such problems by Newton's method or one of its variants such as the Gauss-Newton algorithm. In this paper, we study the computation of the minimal-norm solution to a nonlinear least-squares problem, as well as the case where the solution minimizes a suitable semi-norm. Since many important applications lead to severely ill-conditioned least-squares problems, we also consider some regularization techniques for their solution. Numerical experiments, both artificial and derived from an application in applied geophysics, illustrate the performance of the different approaches. Key words. nonlinear least-squares, nonlinear inverse problem, regularization, Gauss-Newton method