Backpropagation from Scratch

Backpropagation is the algorithm for computing gradients in neural networks using the chain rule of calculus.

Forward Pass

Given input $x$, weights $W$, biases $b$:

• Pre-activation: $z = Wx + b$
• Activation: $a = \sigma(z)$
• Loss: $L = \frac{1}{n}\sum_i (\hat{y}_i - y_i)^2$

Backward Pass (Chain Rule)

$\frac{\partial L}{\partial W} = \frac{\partial L}{\partial a} \cdot \frac{\partial a}{\partial z} \cdot \frac{\partial z}{\partial W}$

Gradient Descent Update

$W \leftarrow W - \eta \cdot \frac{\partial L}{\partial W}$