The following demonstration regards Gradient descent for a standard linear regression model.

## Data Setup

Create some basic data for standard regression.

library(tidyverse)

set.seed(8675309)

n  = 1000
x1 = rnorm(n)
x2 = rnorm(n)
y  = 1 + .5*x1 + .2*x2 + rnorm(n)
X  = cbind(Intercept = 1, x1, x2)  # model matrix

## Function

(Batch) Gradient Descent Algorithm. The function takes arguments starting points for the parameters to be estimated, a tolerance or maximum iteration value to provide a stopping point, stepsize (or starting stepsize for adaptive approach), whether to print out iterations, and whether to plot the loss over each iteration.

gd <- function(
par,
X,
y,
tolerance = 1e-3,
maxit     = 1000,
stepsize  = 1e-3,
verbose   = TRUE,
plotLoss  = TRUE
) {

# initialize
beta = par; names(beta) = colnames(X)
loss = crossprod(X %*% beta - y)
tol  = 1
iter = 1

while(tol > tolerance && iter < maxit){

LP   = X %*% beta
grad = t(X) %*% (LP - y)
betaCurrent = beta - stepsize * grad
tol  = max(abs(betaCurrent - beta))
beta = betaCurrent
loss = append(loss, crossprod(LP - y))
iter = iter + 1

stepsize = ifelse(
loss[iter] < loss[iter - 1],
stepsize * 1.2,
stepsize * .8
)

if (verbose && iter %% 10 == 0)
message(paste('Iteration:', iter))
}

if (plotLoss)
plot(loss, type = 'l', bty = 'n')

list(
par    = beta,
loss   = loss,
RSE    = sqrt(crossprod(LP - y) / (nrow(X) - ncol(X))),
iter   = iter,
fitted = LP
)
}

## Estimation

Set starting values.

init = rep(0, 3)

For any particular data you’d have to fiddle with the stepsize, which could be assessed via cross-validation, or alternatively one can use an adaptive approach, a simple one of which is implemented in this function.

fit_gd = gd(
init,
X = X,
y = y,
tolerance = 1e-8,
stepsize  = 1e-4,
)

str(fit_gd)
List of 5
$par : num [1:3, 1] 0.985 0.487 0.218 ..- attr(*, "dimnames")=List of 2 .. ..$ : chr [1:3] "Intercept" "x1" "x2"
.. ..$: NULL$ loss  : num [1:70] 2315 2315 2075 1918 1760 ...
$RSE : num [1, 1] 1.03$ iter  : num 70
\$ fitted: num [1:1000, 1] 0.441 1.061 0.43 2.125 1.858 ...

## Comparison

We can compare to standard linear regression.

Intercept x1 x2
gd 0.985 0.487 0.218
lm 0.985 0.487 0.218