Thanks for your help...actually there is monotonicity in beta so minimizing the square of the functional constraint works. I verified it with a brute force search (while loop).
For the sake of knowledge this is what someone else suggested (but didn't work in my case) Since x is fixed (given the data), you are really just trying to find inf{beta>0 | g(beta) <= 0} where g() is defined in the obvious way. If you can be sure that the infimum is not 0, then you can get rid of the constraint beta>0 to transforming the problem to inf{gamma | h(gamma) <= 0} where, e.g., h(gamma) = g(exp(gamma)). Now, if your original f is continuous and isn't constant over any interval, say, then you could try to solve for the zeros of h, and the smallest one should be what you're looking for. Finding all the zeros of h could still be hard of course, and I suspect your problem isn't that nice anyway or you wouldn't be asking me. -- View this message in context: http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/Minimization-Optimization-under-functional-constraints-tp3899020p3905137.html Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.