Gradient Descent and the Normal Equation for Linear Regression with Practical Implemetation in…

When I started my machine learning journey, math was something that always intrigued me and still does. I for one believe that libraries such as scikit learn have indeed done wonders for us when it comes to implementing the algorithms but without an understanding of the maths that goes into making the algorithm, we are bound to make mistakes on complicated problems. In this article, I will be going over the math behind Gradient Descent and the derivation behind the Normal linear Equation and then implementing them both on a dataset to get my coefficients. When i was getting started with Linear Regression and trying to get an understanding of the different ways to calculate the coefficients, The Normal Equation was by far my most favorite method to find coefficients but where does this equation come from? Well, let us take a look.