I used scipy.optimize.fmin_bfgs to minimize the hinge loss (SVM). However, there are errors :
Divide-by-zero encountered: rhok assumed large.
Somebody said that “It had to do with the training data set”， anybody knows how to deal with the problem?
From the source code of scipy, rhok is,
rhok = 1.0 / (numpy.dot(yk, sk))
where both yk and sk depend on intput array x0.
A possible causes of this error may be a bad choice of initial condition x0 which tends to singularities in your function f. I would suggest plotting your function and maybe ensuring initial conditions are always away from possible divergent values. If this is part of a larger training routine, you could possibly use try and on catching an ZeroDivisionError try shifting the initial condition shifted by some amount. You may also find a different minimisation method is more robust from scipy minimize.
If you add the full_output option to scipy.optimize.fmin_bfgs it should give you more information about you particular case.
