I am trying to implement a solution to Ridge regression in Python using Stochastic gradient descent as the solver. My code for SGD is as follows:
def fit(self, X, Y):
# Convert to data frame in case X is numpy matrix
X = pd.DataFrame(X)
# Prepend a column of 1s to the data for the intercept
X.insert(0, 'intercept', np.array([1.0]*X.shape[0]))
# Find dimensions of train
m, d = X.shape
# Initialize weights to random
beta = self.initializeRandomWeights(d)
beta_prev = None
epochs = 0
prev_error = None
while (epochs < self.nb_epochs):
print("## Epoch: " + str(epochs))
indices = range(0, m)
shuffle(indices)
for i in indices: # Pick a training example from a randomly shuffled set
beta_prev = beta
xi = X.iloc[i]
errori = sum(beta*xi) - Y[i] # Error[i] = sum(beta*x) - y = error of ith training example
gradient_vector = xi*errori + self.l*beta_prev
beta = beta_prev - self.alpha*gradient_vector
epochs += 1
The data I'm testing this on is not normalized and my implementation always ends up with all the weights being Infinity, even though I initialize the weights vector to low values. Only when I set the learning rate alpha to a very small value ~1e-8, the algorithm ends up with valid values of the weights vector.
My understanding is that normalizing/scaling input features only helps reduce convergence time. But the algorithm should not fail to converge as a whole if the features are not normalized. Is my understanding correct?