Estimation of GAM smoothing parameters is most stable if optimization of the smoothness selection score (GCV, GACV, UBRE/AIC, REML, ML etc) is outer to the penalized iteratively re-weighted least squares scheme used to estimate the model given smoothing parameters.
This routine optimizes a smoothness selection score in this way. Basically the
score is evaluated for each trial set of smoothing parameters by
estimating the GAM for those smoothing parameters. The score is minimized
w.r.t. the parameters numerically, using newton (default), bfgs, optim or nlm. Exact
(first and second) derivatives of the score can be used by fitting with
gam.fit3. This
improves efficiency and reliability relative to relying on finite
difference derivatives.
Not normally called directly, but rather a service routine for gam.
gam.outer(lsp,fscale,family,control,method,optimizer,
criterion,scale,gamma,G,start=NULL,nei=NULL,...)See Wood (2008) for full details on `outer iteration'.
Wood, S.N. (2011) Fast stable restricted maximum likelihood and marginal likelihood estimation of semiparametric generalized linear models. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (B) 73(1):3-36
gam.fit3, gam, magic