Book Image

Regression Analysis with Python

By : Luca Massaron, Alberto Boschetti
4 (1)
Book Image

Regression Analysis with Python

4 (1)
By: Luca Massaron, Alberto Boschetti

Overview of this book

Regression is the process of learning relationships between inputs and continuous outputs from example data, which enables predictions for novel inputs. There are many kinds of regression algorithms, and the aim of this book is to explain which is the right one to use for each set of problems and how to prepare real-world data for it. With this book you will learn to define a simple regression problem and evaluate its performance. The book will help you understand how to properly parse a dataset, clean it, and create an output matrix optimally built for regression. You will begin with a simple regression algorithm to solve some data science problems and then progress to more complex algorithms. The book will enable you to use regression models to predict outcomes and take critical business decisions. Through the book, you will gain knowledge to use Python for building fast better linear models and to apply the results in Python or in any computer language you prefer.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Regression Analysis with Python
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Defining a classification problem


Although the name Logistic Regression suggests a regression operation, the goal of Logistic Regression is classification. In a very rigorous world such as statistics, why is this technique ambiguously named? Simple, the name is not wrong at all, and it makes perfect sense: it just requires a bit of an introduction and investigation. After that you'll fully understand why it's named Logistic Regression, and you'll no longer think that it's a wrong name.

First, let's introduce what a classification problem is, what a classifier is, how it operates, and what its output is.

In the previous chapter, we presented regression as the operation of estimating a continuous value in a target variable; mathematically speaking, the predicted variable is a real number in the range (−∞, +∞). Classification, instead, predicts a class, that is, an index in a finite set of classes. The simplest case is named binary classification, and the output is typically a Boolean value ...