| Michael Zhang \<zhan4854@umn.edu\> $\cdot$ ID: 5289259
---
1._A short description of how you went about parallelizing the classification algorithm. You should include how you decomposed the problem and why, i.e., what were the tasks being parallelized._
The parallelization I used was incredibly simple, primarily just parallelizing outer iterations. For the OpenMP version I also went ahead and parallelized by the rows, but only if there were more cores than the number of dimensions, as a simple heuristic.
The reason I didn't go further was that further breaking down of the for loops incurred more overhead from managing the parallelization than was actually gained. I have run this several times and the gains were either neglient, or it actually ran slower than the serial version.
I noticed that the loss sometimes fluctuates rather wildly. I think this is because there's no fixed learning rate, so instead of going incrementally, we kind of just take each dimension's minimum and haphazardly combine them together. In Wikipedia's description[^1] of the algorithm, they take the $w_i$ in particular that results in the minimal loss _by itself_, and then only use that $w_i$ for that outer iteration. I'm wondering if this will produce a better convergence, but I tried to stick to implementing the algorithm described in the pdf for the sake of the assignment since I'm guessing the effectiveness of the machine learning model isn't the important thing here.
Also, there's a part in the end of the program that performs validation on the trained model by using a train/test data set split. I didn't count this towards execution time but felt that it was important enough to keep since it ensured that my program was still behaving correctly.
