CRPC-TR98770-S September 1998 Title: The Behavior of Newton-type Methods on Two Equivalent Systems from Linear Programming Authors: Maria Cristina Villalobos, Richard A. Tapia, and Yin Zhang Submitted September 1998; revised July 1999; available as Rice CAAM TR98-02 Abstract: Newton-type methods are fundamental techniques for solving systems of nonlinear equations. However, it is often not fully appreciated that these methods can produce significantly different behavior when applied to equivalent systems. In this paper, we investigate differences in local and global behavior of Newton-type methods when applied to two different but equivalent systems from linear programming: the optimality conditions of the logarithmic barrier formulation and the perturbed optimality conditions. Through theoretical analysis and numerical results, we show Newton-type methods perform more effectively on the latter system. Key words: Newton's method; equivalent systems; interior-point methods; sphere of convergence; linear programming ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Maria Cristina Villalobos Richard A. Tapia Yin Zhang cristina@caam.rice.edu rat@caam.rice.edu zhang@caam.rice.edu Department of Computational and Applied Mathematics Rice University