## Motivation

Let’s say you’re given 10,000 emails, each labeled as spam or not spam, and the wide range of vocabulary of the emails spans 100,000 words total. Should you use linear regression on the labeled emails to build a spam filter? No. Let’s learn why.

## Turning this into a math problem

First, let’s set this up as a math problem.

• m = number of training samples
• n = number of features

In this problem, $$m = 10,000$$ and $$n=100,000$$. Let’s represent a single email by a feature vector:

$x = \begin{bmatrix} 1 \\ 0 \\ 0 \\ \vdots \\ 1 \\ \vdots \\ 0 \\ \end{bmatrix} \quad \begin{array}{l} \text{a} \\ \text{ability} \\ \text{able} \\ \vdots \\ \text{bargain} \\ \vdots \\ \text{zap} \\ \end{array}$

A 1 in the $$i$$-th position of the feature vector means the email has the corresponding $$i$$-th word (i.e., a 1 in the 1st position means the word “a” exists in the email). On the other hand, a 0 means the word doesn’t appear. In the example above, the feature vector shows the email contains the words “a” and “bargain” but not “ability”, “able”, and “zap”. Notice that the feature vector doesn’t take into account the order with which the words appear in an email.

If you were to apply linear regression on this problem, the goal would be to find 100,000 weights. Each of these weights ($$\theta_1, \theta_2, \cdots, \theta_{100,000}$$) controls how much influence each of the words in the email have on the decision to classify that email as spam or not. For example, if $$\theta_2 = 0$$, then it’s telling us the 2nd word in the feature vector, the word “ability”, doesn’t give us more information about whether or not an email is spam.

Mathematically, we want the dot product of the weight vector and the feature vector, or $$x^T \theta$$. $$x^T$$ is a $$1 \times n$$ vector and $$\theta$$ is a $$n \times 1$$ vector, so their dot product is a $$1 \times 1$$ vector, which is a scalar called the hypothesis, and it’s often denoted by $$h_\theta(x)$$. The hypothesis can be any of a range of values. It can be 20, 102.5, 900.1092, or 1,000,000.

## Reason 1: The hypothesis’s range should be {0, 1}

This brings us to the first folly of using linear regression to build a spam filter. The hypothesis should be a value 1 or 0 (spam or not spam, respectively). Yet linear regression allows it be any real number. Mathematically, we want $$h_\theta(x) \in \{0, 1\}$$, yet with linear regression we get $$h_\theta(x) \in \mathbb{R}$$.

## Reason 2: What is a good threshold value $$b$$?

Because $$h_\theta(x) \in \mathbb{R}$$, we have to define a function that allows us to transform $$h_\theta(x)$$ into 0 or 1.

$f ( h_\theta(x) ) = \left\{ \begin{array}{ll} 0 & \text{if } h_\theta(x) > b \\ 1 & \text{if } h_\theta(x) \leq b \end{array} \right.$

where b is a threshold value. If the hypothesis is above b, we’ll say the email is not spam. If it’s below or equal to b, we’ll say it is spam. Now comes the question, what should b be? And even if you determine b, if you add a new email to your set of emails with which you built a spam filter, the new email could dramatically change the weight vector and alter how your spam filter perceives existing email. Watch this excellent explanation by Andrew Ng if you’re still confused.

## Reason 3: The normal equations cannot be solved

If we stack all the emails, we get an $$m \times n$$ matrix

$X = \begin{bmatrix} \begin{array}{ccc} -- & \left(x^{(1)}\right)^T & -- \\ -- & \left(x^{(2)}\right)^T & -- \\ & \vdots & \\ -- & \left(x^{(m)}\right)^T & -- \end{array} \end{bmatrix}$

The label for each email (spam, 1 or not spam, 0) can be represented by a vector y

$y = \begin{bmatrix} \begin{array}{c} 1 \\ 0 \\ 0 \\ 1 \\ \vdots \\ 1 \end{array} \end{bmatrix}$

To find the optimal weight vector $$\theta$$, use the following equation

$\theta = \left( X^TX \right)^{-1} X^T y$

This is called the normal equation. Unfortunately, for our problem, it can’t be solved because $$X^TX$$ has no inverse.