Initial values for gradient descent algorithm

Course Q&A Machine Learning Specialization Supervised ML: Regression and Classification
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1

Week 1 and Week 2 Gradient descent algorithm
Link: https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning/lecture/2f2PA/gradient-descent

Description:
I have below 2 questions:

  1. How to assume the initial values for the parameters w and b? Should we always start with 0, 0?

  2. How to decide the no. of iterations for which the gradient descent will run?

2

  1. For simple regressions, starting with zeros is a good choice. We have no way to pick any better initial values.

  2. Experimentation. Find the number of iterations which give good-enough convergence.