Stochastic procedures comparisons

Comparisons of a variety of methods were made on cycloheptadecane by Saunders et al. (91) and it was concluded that the stochastic method was most efficient. In one of the few independent comparisons of the effectiveness of these procedures, Boehm et al. (122) studied the sampling properties on the model system caprylolactam, a nine-membered ring, and concluded that systematic search was both inefficient and ineffective at finding the minima found by the other methods when the number of conformers examined was limited. 

The regression procedure is strongly influenced by stochastic errors or noise in the measurement. One effect is illustrated in comparison of Figure 19.1 to Figure 19.3, in which stochastic noise with a standard deviation equal to 1 percent of the modulus was added to the synthetic data. Solid lines have been drawn on the bottom contour map to indicate the values for which the function is inmimized. The presence of stochastic errors in the data does not introduce roughness in the parabolic... 

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