My own understanding has led to a different approach from those answers given to this query. For more formal and appropriate programming approaches to this problem, I would recommend following the methods given in those previous answers.
However, if you are just interested in interrogating and understanding what is happening in your model, and how the optimiser is progressing, then you can as easily use a simple interrogation of global variables to help you do this. And it is simple to later remove this code without effecting the resulting code.
In your top level .m script which calls the optimiser, declare a global variable, say 'variable_tracking_array'. In your objective function (the function that the optimiser calls to evaluate its performance) redeclare the same global variable. Then assign whatever variables from that function you wish to monitor each time the function is called.
If, in addition, you want to stack them in an array so you can see the entirety of the variable values and the sequence in which they were calculated, simply define a persistent variable, say 'n_calls' in your objective function, and increment it each time the function is called, and use it as the index to specify into which row (or column) you wish to place the current set of variables into the already globally defined variable array.
If you wish, you can supplement this data with the information available from specifying the options for displaying iteration information for the optimiser, in which case you get a fairly complete picture of the progress and 'thinking' of the optimiser, as it does its job.
Happy investigations!
example.
In the main calling script where your optimiser is called from, eg. mainscript.m...
global variable_tracking_array;%<-create a global for tracking data
variable_tracking_array = zeros(1000,3);%<-in this case we're tracking 3 variables
In your objective_function.m script that the optimiser calls using @objective_function put
the following near the start of your function amongst the variable declarations...
persistent n_calls;%<-this will be incrementing each time the function is called
if isempty(n_calls)
n_calls=0;
end
global variable_tracking_array;%<-this is so you can see the global variable
And in the same objective_function.m script, near the end of the function, before it exits, put the following...
n_calls=n_calls+1;%<-increments each time the objective_function completes
variable_tracking_array(n_calls,1)=variable_1;%<-you can supply any local variable name, not just variable_1 :-)
variable_tracking_array(n_calls,2)=variable_2;
variable_tracking_array(n_calls,3)=variable_3;
