/*
 * Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
 * contributor license agreements.  See the NOTICE file distributed with
 * this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership.
 * The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0
 * (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with
 * the License.  You may obtain a copy of the License at
 *
 *      http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
 *
 * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
 * distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
 * WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
 * See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
 * limitations under the License.
 */

package org.apache.commons.math.estimation;

/**
 * This interface represents an estimation problem.
 *
 * <p>
 * This interface should be implemented by all real estimation problems before
 * they can be handled by the estimators through the {@link Estimator#estimate
 * Estimator.estimate} method.
 * </p>
 *
 * <p>
 * An estimation problem, as seen by a solver is a set of parameters and a set
 * of measurements. The parameters are adjusted during the estimation through
 * the {@link #getUnboundParameters getUnboundParameters} and
 * {@link EstimatedParameter#setEstimate EstimatedParameter.setEstimate}
 * methods. The measurements both have a measured value which is generally fixed
 * at construction and a theoretical value which depends on the model and hence
 * varies as the parameters are adjusted. The purpose of the solver is to reduce
 * the residual between these values, it can retrieve the measurements through
 * the {@link #getMeasurements getMeasurements} method.
 * </p>
 *
 * @see Estimator
 * @see WeightedMeasurement
 *
 * @version $Revision$ $Date$
 * @since 1.2
 * @deprecated as of 2.0, everything in package
 *             org.apache.commons.math.estimation has been deprecated and
 *             replaced by package org.apache.commons.math.optimization.general
 *
 */
@Deprecated
public interface EstimationProblem {
	/**
	 * Get the measurements of an estimation problem.
	 * 
	 * @return measurements
	 */
	public WeightedMeasurement[] getMeasurements();

	/**
	 * Get the unbound parameters of the problem.
	 * 
	 * @return unbound parameters
	 */
	public EstimatedParameter[] getUnboundParameters();

	/**
	 * Get all the parameters of the problem.
	 * 
	 * @return parameters
	 */
	public EstimatedParameter[] getAllParameters();

}
