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I'm going to be using a logistic regression model and using SGD to determine the feature weights. Is it OK for me to use a mix of binary and real features, without doing anything like scaling or normalization, and just leave it to SGD to give me a model with weights that will work?

Thanks

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Binary features have a natural scale, so there is no need to rescale them. The real valued features need to be normalized by subtracting the mean and dividing by the range.

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  • $\begingroup$ Is it necessary, though, in logistic regression? Wouldn't gradient descent find suitable coefficients regardless of whether I scaled the parameters or not? $\endgroup$ – Walrus the Cat Aug 19 '14 at 19:54
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    $\begingroup$ Rescaling has the effect of making the surface of the gradient of your error less elliptical, allowing you to tune the step-size for an epoch more sensibly. Cross-validate with and without normalization. If you don't have too much data (<500,000 observations), compare the results with bfgs. $\endgroup$ – Jessica Collins Aug 20 '14 at 17:19

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