A family of derivative-free conjugate gradient methods for large-scale nonlinear systems of equations

In this paper, we propose a family of derivative-free conjugate gradient methods for large-scale nonlinear systems of equations. They come from two modified conjugate gradient methods [W.Y. Cheng, A two term PRP based descent Method, Numer. Funct. Anal. Optim. 28 (2007) 1217–1230; L. Zhang, W.J. Zhou, D.H. Li, A descent modified Polak–Ribiére–Polyak conjugate gradient method and its global convergence, IMA J. Numer. Anal. 26 (2006) 629–640] recently proposed for unconstrained optimization problems. Under appropriate conditions, the global convergence of the proposed method is established. Preliminary numerical results show that the proposed method is promising.