# Regularization

In the context of statistics, data mining, and machine learning – specifically when designing optimization-based methods for data fitting — regularization refers to the idea of choosing a model that purposefully does not fit the training data the best it could. The intuition is that, while we want complex models that can capture interesting features from the data, we want to prevent the model from fitting the noise in the training data, rather than the features.

In summary, regularization is a way to control the complexity of the model. In other words, we are talking about model selection. The first question one could ask is: “but why do we not control the model by explicitly choosing different models?” That is certainly one way to do model selection, but it is a surprisingly tricky one in practice. In simple cases (like linear regression), it is easy to compare two models to see which is more complex. But it’s not as simple to choose the appropriate model complexity.

In contrast, typical methods for regularization allow us to more easily connect the relationship of the amount of regularization to the amount of noise in the data.

The simplest example of regularization is known as “ridge regression”, and it builds on linear regression.

## Ridge Regression

The ridge regression model is quite simple. Recall the typical linear least squares setup:

$X \beta = y$

Here, we are looking to fit the best parameters $\beta$ to rows of the design matrix. Each input point $(v_i, y_i)$ is mapped to some feature space encoded in the rows of $X$ ($f(v_i) = x_{i\star}$). The $\beta$ parameters which minimize the expected squared error are:

$\hat{\beta} = (X^T X)^{-1} X^T y$

Without regularization, if our design includes too many parameters (for example, if we try to fit a polynomial of too-high a degree), our model will overfit. This can be seen in the demo below by increasing the degree, the noise, and setting the regularization to a very low value. In ridge regression, we create an extra parameter $\lambda$, and we want the extra parameter to control the complexity of the model. In short, the larger $\lambda$ is, the simpler we want our model to be. The error function for ridge regression is:

$E = || X \beta - y ||^2 + \lambda ||\beta||^2$

The solution for ridge regression is similar to that of linear least squares:

$\hat{\beta} = (X^T X + \lambda I)^{-1} X^T y$

Notice that $E$ tries to balance two things: how bad the results are (the left term), and how large the vector of parameter values are. In other words, if we increase $\lambda$, this new error term will tend to interpret large magnitudes in $\beta$ as a bad sign. At first, it’s puzzling that we would want the vector of parameter values to have a small magnitude.

### Data imputation

Ridge regression is equivalent to doing typical least squares while adding “ghost” entries to the data set. If $X$ has $n$ columns, then you should be able to see that adding $n$ new data points to the dataset, where $v_{m+1} = (\sqrt{\lambda}, 0, \ldots, 0)$, $v_{m+2} = (0, \sqrt{\lambda}, 0, \ldots, 0)$, etc. and $y_{m+1} = y_{m+2} = \cdots = 0$.

In this interpretation, we see that regularization is trying to push all parameters of $\beta$ uniformly to zero (since that’s the only way that $\beta$ will satisfy these specific values) by adding entries to the dataset that do not really exist.

In other words, regularization is equivalent to showing the training procedure a slight fiction (pessimistic towards zero), in order to not let the model get overexcited.

### Normalization of data

When using ridge regression, it becomes important to make sure that your data is normalized: in other words, the values in each column should have mean zero, and variance 1.

This normalization can be seen to be necessary by considering the data imputation view.

If we do not set the mean of each column to zero, then regularization biases the model away from the data. That’s a very bad thing: if nothing else, our simplest models should be shooting for the average data point. Without normalization, they do not (you can confirm this by unchecking the normalization box in the demo below).

Without setting the variance of all the features to be the same, ridge regression will penalize some features more than others. This is easier to see again in the imputation view of ridge regression: each of the ghost entries pushes the solution equally to zero.

If the variance of the data is not one, then things mostly work, but regularization values become hard to compare across datasets, because the amount of regularization becomes relative to the variance on the specific datasets.

### Effective degrees of freedom

The degrees of freedom of a model can be recovered from the trace of the Hat matrix. So we can look at the trace of the Hat matrix of the Ridge regression to recover the effective degrees of freedom. This notion of model complexity is more directly comparable across different models (the full story is more complicated, but this is a very useful fiction). The formula for the effective degrees of freedom in a model is:

$\textrm{eff-df} = \sum_i \left . \frac{\sigma_i^2}{\sigma_i^2 + \lambda} \right .$

Play around with the demo below, and notice how models with different dimensions (measured by the degree of the polynomials being fit) but with the same effective degrees of freedom, tend to look the same.

## Ridge Regression Demo

Degree: .

Regularization: .

Noise level: .

Effective degrees of freedom:

Normalize columns: