Let’s begin our journey with the truth — machines never learn. What a typical machine learning algorithm does is find a mathematical equation that, when applied to a given set of training data, produces a prediction that is very close to the actual output.

Why is this not learning? Because if you change the training data or environment even slightly, the algorithm will go haywire! Not how learning works in humans. If you learned to play a video game by looking straight at the screen, you would still be a good player if the screen is slightly tilted by someone, which would not be the case in ML algorithms.

However, most of the algorithms are so complex and intimidating that it gives our mere human intelligence the feel of actual learning, effectively hiding the underlying math within. There goes a dictum that if you can implement the algorithm, you know the algorithm. This saying is lost in the dense jungle of libraries and inbuilt modules which programming languages provide, reducing us to regular programmers calling an API and strengthening further this notion of a black box. Our quest will be to unravel the mysteries of this so-called ‘black box’ which magically produces accurate predictions, detects objects, diagnoses diseases and claims to surpass human intelligence one day.

We will start with one of the not-so-complex and easy to visualize algorithm in the ML paradigm — Linear Regression. The article is divided into the following sections:

1. Need for Linear Regression

2. Visualizing Linear Regression

3. Deriving the formula for weight matrix W

4. Using the formula and performing linear regression on a real world data set

Note: Knowledge on Linear Algebra, a little bit of Calculus and Matrices are a prerequisite to understanding this article

Also, a basic understanding of python, NumPy, and Matplotlib are a must.

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1) Need for Linear regression

Regression means predicting a real valued number from a given set of input variables. Eg. Predicting temperature based on month of the year, humidity, altitude above sea level, etc. Linear Regression would therefore mean predicting a real valued number that follows a linear trend. Linear regression is the first line of attack to discover correlations in our data.

Now, the first thing that comes to our mind when we hear the word linear is, a line.

Yes! In linear regression, we try to fit a line that best generalizes all the data points in the data set. By generalizing, we mean we try to fit a line that passes very close to all the data points.

But how do we ensure that this happens? To understand this, let’s visualize a 1-D Linear Regression. This is also called as Simple Linear Regression

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