Question 1

Consider the problem of predicting how well a student does in her second year of college/university, given how well she did in her first year.

Specifically, let x be equal to the number of “A” grades (including A-. A and A+ grades) that a student receives in their first year of college (freshmen year). We would like to predict the value of y, which we define as the number of “A” grades they get in their second year (sophomore year).

Here each row is one training example. Recall that in linear regression, our hypothesis is hθ(x)=θ0+θ1x, and we use m to denote the number of training examples.

x

y

5

4

3

4

0

1

4

3

For the training set given above (note that this training set may also be referenced in other questions in this quiz), what is the value of m? In the box below, please enter your answer (which should be a number between 0 and 10).

Answer:

4

Question 2

Consider the following training set of m=4 training examples:

x

y

1

0.5

2

1

4

2

0

0

Consider the linear regression model hθ(x)=θ0+θ1x. What are the values of θ0 and θ1
that you would expect to obtain upon running gradient descent on this
model? (Linear regression will be able to fit this data perfectly.)

    • θ0=0.5,θ1=0

    • θ0=0.5,θ1=0.5

    • θ0=1,θ1=0.5

    • θ0=0,θ1=0.5

    • θ0=1,θ1=1

Answer:

θ0=0,θ1=0.5

As J(θ0,θ1)=0, y = hθ(x) = θ0 + θ1x. Using any two values in the table, solve for θ0, θ1.

Question 3

Suppose we set θ0=−1,θ1=0.5. What is hθ(4)?

Answer:

Setting x = 4, we have hθ(x)=θ0+θ1x = -1 + (0.5)(4) = 1

Question 4

Let f be some function so that f(θ0,θ1) outputs a number. For this problem,f is some arbitrary/unknown smooth function (not necessarily the cost function of linear regression, so f may have local optima).Suppose we use gradient descent to try to minimize f(θ0,θ1)  as a function of θ0 and θ1. Which of thefollowing statements are true? (Check all that apply.)

    • Even if the learning rate α is very large, every iteration of gradient descent will decrease the value of f(θ0,θ1).

    • If the learning rate is too small, then gradient descent may take a very long time to converge.

    • If θ0 and θ1 are initialized at a local minimum, then one iteration will not change their values.

    • If θ0 and θ1 are initialized so that θ0=θ1,
      then by symmetry (because we do simultaneous updates to the two
      parameters), after one iteration of gradient descent, we will still have
      θ0=θ1.

Answers:

True or False

Statement

Explanation

True

If the learning rate is too small, then gradient descent may take a very long time to converge.

If the learning rate is small, gradient descent ends up taking an
extremely small step on each iteration, and therefor can take a long
time to converge

True

If θ0 and θ1 are initialized at a local minimum, then one iteration will not change their values.

At a local minimum, the derivative (gradient) is zero, so gradient descent will not change the parameters.

False

Even if the learning rate α is very large, every iteration of gradient descent will decrease the value of f(θ0,θ1).

If the learning rate is too large, one step of gradient descent
can actually vastly “overshoot” and actually increase the value of f(θ0,θ1).

False

If θ0 and θ1 are initialized so that θ0=θ1,
then by symmetry (because we do simultaneous updates to the two
parameters), after one iteration of gradient descent, we will still have
θ0=θ1.

The updates to θ0 and θ1 are different (even
though we’re doing simulaneous updates), so there’s no particular
reason to update them to be same after one iteration of gradient
descent.

Other Options:

True or False

Statement

Explanation

True

If the first few iterations of gradient descent cause f(θ0,θ1) to increase rather than decrease, then the most likely cause is that we have set the learning rate to too large a value

if alpha were small enough, then gradient descent should always successfully take a tiny small downhill and decrease f(θ0,θ1)
at least a little bit. If gradient descent instead increases the
objective value, that means alpha is too large (or you have a bug in
your code!).

False

No matter how θ0 and θ1 are initialized, so
long as learning rate is sufficiently small, we can safely expect
gradient descent to converge to the same solution

This is not true, depending on the initial condition, gradient descent may end up at different local optima.

False

Setting the learning rate to be very small is not harmful, and can only speed up the convergence of gradient descent.

If the learning rate is small, gradient descent ends up taking an
extremely small step on each iteration, so this would actually slow down
(rather than speed up) the convergence of the algorithm.

Question 5

Suppose that for some linear regression problem (say, predicting
housing prices as in the lecture), we have some training set, and for
our training set we managed to find some θ0, θ1 such that J(θ0,θ1)=0.

Which of the statements below must then be true? (Check all that apply.)

    • For this to be true, we must have y(i)=0 for every value of i=1,2,…,m.

    • Gradient descent is likely to get stuck at a local minimum and fail to find the global minimum.

    • For this to be true, we must have θ0=0 and θ1=0 so that hθ(x)=0

    • Our training set can be fit perfectly by a straight line, i.e.,
      all of our training examples lie perfectly on some straight line.

Answers:

True or False

Statement

Explanation

False

For this to be true, we must have y(i)=0 for every value of i=1,2,…,m.

So long as all of our training examples lie on a straight line, we will be able to find θ0 and θ1) so that J(θ0,θ1)=0. It is not necessary that y(i) for all our examples.

False

Gradient descent is likely to get stuck at a local minimum and fail to find the global minimum.

none

False

For this to be true, we must have θ0=0 and θ1=0 so that hθ(x)=0

If J(θ0,θ1)=0 that means the line defined by the equation “y = θ0 + θ1x” perfectly fits all of our data. There’s no particular reason to expect that the values of θ0 and θ1 that achieve this are both 0 (unless y(i)=0 for all of our training examples).

True

Our training set can be fit perfectly by a straight line, i.e., all of our training examples lie perfectly on some straight line.

If J(θ0,θ1)=0, that means the line defined by the equation "y=θ0+θ1x" perfectly fits all of our data.
 False

 

We can perfectly predict the value of y even for new examples that we have not yet seen. (e.g., we can perfectly predict prices of even new houses that we have not yet seen.)

 

  None
False

 This is not possible: By the definition of J(θ0,θ1), it is not possible for there to exist θ0 and θ1 so that J(θ0,θ1)=0

 None
True

 For these values of θ0 and θ1 that satisfy J(θ0,θ1)=0, we have that hθ(x(i))=y(i) for every training example (x(i),y(i))

 Not all the hθ(x(i)) need to be equal to y(i)