# Gradient Descent (back to blog)

Machine learning is, in the most general terms, a method to learn the relationships between different things. It's really easy to come up with a function to describe some relationships. For example, given a certain number of quarters, we can calculate the number of cents with the function $$f(quarters) = 25 * quarters$$.

However, it's far more difficult (most of the time impossible) to create a function which exactly describes more complicated relationships. For these situations, instead of creating an exact function, we can learn an approximate one.

Creating a very general template for a function and using gradient descent to optimize that template's parameters is one way to do this. To learn how to use gradient descent, let's try to create a function which approximates the number of square feet in a house given the number of bedrooms and the number of bathrooms.

## Getting the data

Since gradient descent is a supervised learning algorithm, we need many example houses where we know the number of bedrooms, bathrooms, and total square feet. Our algorithm will use this data to learn an approximate function.

Luckily, Kaggle has an example dataset which we can get our information from. There are two files of interest. The file train.csv has a list of houses we can train our function on. The file test.csv has a list of houses we can test our function on to see how well it works.

The first step is to make a function which takes this data and sanitizes it into something we can actually work with. The function below does exactly that.

import numpy as np
import pandas as pd

houses = []

for _, row in df.iterrows():
square_feet = row['GrLivArea']
beds = row['BedroomAbvGr']
full_baths = row['BsmtFullBath'] + row['FullBath']
half_baths = row['BsmtHalfBath'] + row['HalfBath']

if any(np.isnan([square_feet, beds, full_baths, half_baths])):
continue

houses.append(
{
'beds': beds,
'baths': full_baths + (half_baths / 2),
'squarefeet': square_feet
}
)

return houses

## Choosing a function format

The next step is to choose a general form for the function we want to learn. This can be as simple or complicated as we want. Lets start with really simple and just multiply some constant to the sum of both the beds and the baths.

def pred_squarefeet(beds, baths, a):
return a * (beds + baths)

## Optimization

The only parameter to tune in pred_squarefeet is $$a$$ so our goal is to find a selection of $$a$$ which gives us the best results. To do this we need to have a measurement of how good a certain selection of $$a$$ actually is. If we know how good any specific selection is, we can determine the best possible selection. This is done with a loss function.

def loss(actual_squarefeet, beds, baths, a):
return (actual_squarefeet - pred_squarefeet(beds, baths, a)) ** 2

This loss function gives us a metric of how bad our estimate is for any given house. Now we just have to choose a value of $$a$$ that minimizes the total loss for all houses. The steps below show the general process of using gradient descent to do this.

1. Choose a random value for $$a$$.
2. Find out how changing $$a$$ affects our loss for a specific house (Should we move it up or down?).
3. Slightly tweak $$a$$ in the right direction by some small value.
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 for each house in our dataset until $$a$$ converges (until we are just tweaking $$a$$ around 1 point).

Lets first find out how changing $$a$$ affects our loss for a single house. We can do this by finding the partial derivative of the loss function with respect to $$a$$.

Note: We made the loss equal to the square of the difference rather than the absolute value so the partial derivative is calculable.

def a_loss_partial_deriv(bed, bath, a, actual_sf):
return ((2 * a * (bed ** 2))
+ (4 * a * bed * bath)
+ (2 * a * (bath ** 2))
- (2 * bed * actual_sf)
- (2 * bath * actual_sf))

Here is how you calculate the partial derivative if you like math.

\begin{align} & \frac{\partial Loss}{\partial a} Loss(actualsquarefeet, beds, baths, a)\\~\\ & = \frac{\partial Loss}{\partial a} (actualsquarefeet - (a \cdot (beds + baths)))^2 = \\~\\ & = \frac{\partial Loss}{\partial a} ((a^2 \cdot beds^2) + (2 \cdot a^2 \cdot beds \cdot baths) \\ & \qquad \qquad + (a^2 \cdot baths^2) - (2 \cdot a \cdot beds \cdot actualsquarefeet) \\ & \qquad \qquad - (2 \cdot a \cdot baths \cdot actualsquarefeet) + actualsquarefeet^2) = \\~\\ & = (2 \cdot a \cdot beds^2) \\ & \qquad + (4 \cdot a \cdot beds \cdot baths) \\ & \qquad + (2 \cdot a \cdot baths^2) \\ & \qquad - (2 \cdot beds \cdot actualsquarefeet) \\ & \qquad - (2 \cdot baths \cdot actualsquarefeet) \end{align}

If $$\frac{\partial Loss}{\partial a}$$ is negative, increasing $$a$$ will decrease the loss for that specific house. If $$\frac{\partial Loss}{\partial a}$$ is positive, decreasing $$a$$ will decrease the loss for a house. Lets loop through all of the houses in our training dataset and tweak $$a$$ in the right direction for each one. The amount we tweak $$a$$ is called the LEARNING_RATE.

train_data = load_data(path_to_your_training_data)

LEARNING_RATE = 0.01 # the amount we will tweak a

a = 5 # set a to some random value

for datum in train_data:
beds = datum['beds']
baths = datum['baths']
actual_sf = datum['squarefeet']

a_part_deriv = a_loss_partial_deriv(beds, baths, a, actual_sf)

if a_part_deriv < 0:
a += LEARNING_RATE
elif a_part_deriv > 0
a -= LEARNING_RATE

Note, that since our learning rate is really small, $$a$$ may not converge if we just loop over the training dataset once. To help it converge, lets loop over it many times. The number of times we loop over the training dataset is called how many EPOCHS we train for.

train_data = load_data(path_to_your_training_data)

LEARNING_RATE = 0.01 # the amount we will tweak a
EPOCHS = 1000

a = 5 # set a to some random value

for _ in range(EPOCHS):
for datum in train_data:
beds = datum['beds']
baths = datum['baths']
actual_sf = datum['squarefeet']

a_part_deriv = a_loss_partial_deriv(beds, baths, a, actual_sf)

if a_part_deriv < 0:
a += LEARNING_RATE
elif a_part_deriv > 0
a -= LEARNING_RATE

## Testing

Now that we have our value for $$a$$, lets test how good our function actually is by finding the average error and loss of our predictions on the test dataset.

test_data = load_data(path_to_your_test_data)
loss = []
errors = []
for datum in test_data:
beds = datum['beds']
baths = datum['baths']
expected_squarefeet = datum['squarefeet']

actual_squarefeet = pred_squarefeet(beds, baths, a)

loss.append(loss(actual_squarefeet, expected_squarefeet))
errors.append(abs(expected_squarefeet - actual_squarefeet) / actual_squarefeet)

avg_loss = sum(loss) / len(loss)
avg_error = sum(errors) / len(errors)

print('Loss: {}'.format(avg_loss))
print('Error: {}'.format(avg_error))

Our algorithm has an average loss of $$113766.75$$. In other words, it is an average of $$\sqrt{113766.75} = 337.30$$ square feet off. The average error is $$17.5\%$$. This isn't bad for such a simple model.