And one tip, if you use this to scale your training data, then use the same mu and
sigma squared to normalize your test set, right?
In particular, you don't want to normalize the training set and
the test set differently.
Whatever this value is and whatever this value is, use them in these two
formulas so that you scale your test set in exactly the same way, rather than
estimating mu and sigma squared separately on your training set and test set.
Because you want your data, both training and test examples,
to go through the same transformation defined by the same mu and
sigma squared calculated on your training data.
So, why do we do this?
Why do we want to normalize the input features?
Recall that a cost function is defined as written on the top right.
It turns out that if you use unnormalized input features, it's more likely
that your cost function will look like this, it's a very squished out bowl, very
elongated cost function, where the minimum you're trying to find is maybe over there.
But if your features are on very different scales, say the feature X1 ranges
from 1 to 1,000, and the feature X2 ranges from 0 to 1,
then it turns out that the ratio or the range of values for
the parameters w1 and w2 will end up taking on very different values.
And so maybe these axes should be w1 and w2, but I'll plot w and b,
then your cost function can be a very elongated bowl like that.
So if you part the contours of this function,
you can have a very elongated function like that.
Whereas if you normalize the features,
then your cost function will on average look more symmetric.
And if you're running gradient descent on the cost function like the one on
the left, then you might have to use a very small learning rate because if you're
here that gradient descent might need a lot of steps to oscillate back and
forth before it finally finds its way to the minimum.
Whereas if you have a more spherical contours, then wherever you start
gradient descent can pretty much go straight to the minimum.
You can take much larger steps with gradient descent rather than needing to
oscillate around like like the picture on the left.
Of course in practice w is a high-dimensional vector, and so
trying to plot this in 2D doesn't convey all the intuitions correctly.
But the rough intuition that your cost function will be more round and
easier to optimize when your features are all on similar scales.
Not from one to 1000, zero to one, but
mostly from minus one to one or of about similar variances of each other.
That just makes your cost function J easier and faster to optimize.
In practice if one feature, say X1, ranges from zero to one, and
X2 ranges from minus one to one, and X3 ranges from one to two,
these are fairly similar ranges, so this will work just fine.
It's when they're on dramatically different ranges like
ones from 1 to a 1000, and
the another from 0 to 1, that that really hurts your authorization algorithm.
But by just setting all of them to a 0 mean and say, variance 1, like we did in
the last slide, that just guarantees that all your features on a similar scale and
will usually help your learning algorithm run faster.
So, if your input features came from very different scales,
maybe some features are from 0 to 1,
some from 1 to 1,000, then it's important to normalize your features.
If your features came in on similar scales, then this step is less important.
Although performing this type of normalization pretty much never does any
harm, so I'll often do it anyway if I'm not sure whether or
not it will help with speeding up training for your algebra.
