I struggle a lot whenever I learn new mathematical concepts and always sought for some sort of visualization to ease the learning process. I hope I am not alone. We are all comfortable at learning something by looking at the pictures from our childhood onwards. Our brain is wired like that. However, as we progress in the various stages of the education system, pictures are dropped gradually and words and definitions start occupying the pages!.That is inevitable. However, there is a light at the end of the tunnel, we can create supplementary materials and put them online. Whoever searches it will find it!
A picture is worth a thousand words!.Nowadays, it is possible to go beyond just a static picture. We can create animations!.Though learners feel them appealing to their eyes, it makes it impossible to pay attention to details. So, what could be the better way?. We have to go beyond it by introducing interactive applets. Interactive applets are the one that helps learners to comprehend the concepts by playing around with the variable components at their own pace. There are many platforms like PhET which provides these sorts of Applets for free to all learners around the world.
I searched for similar applets to teach concepts in Machine Learning and Deep Learning. However, I am not able to find any (of course, there are some animations!). So I started creating the one for the course using Geogebra!. Here is the applet for you to interact!.
Move the ball residing on the loss surface (left figure in the applet) and see the corresponding regression line that fits the data points (right figure in the applet). Draw contours on the parameter space by clicking on "Show contours" button. Reset the applet to the beggining state by clicking on the "Reset" button. Happy Learning!