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

Qualitative feature encoding


Beyond numeric features, which have been the main topic of this section so far, a great part of your data will also comprise qualitative variables. Databases especially tend to record data readable and understandable by human beings; consequently, they are quite crowded by qualitative data, which can appear in data fields in the form of text or just single labels explicating information, such as telling you the class of an observation or some of its characteristics.

For a better understanding of qualitative variables, a working example could be a weather dataset. Such a dataset describes conditions under which you would want to play tennis because of weather information such as outlook, temperature, humidity, and wind, which are all kinds of information that can be rendered by numeric measurements. However, you will easily find such data online and recorded in datasets with their qualitative translations such as sunny or overcast, rather than numeric satellite...