Book Image

Regression Analysis with R

By : Giuseppe Ciaburro
Book Image

Regression Analysis with R

By: Giuseppe Ciaburro

Overview of this book

Regression analysis is a statistical process which enables prediction of relationships between variables. The predictions are based on the casual effect of one variable upon another. Regression techniques for modeling and analyzing are employed on large set of data in order to reveal hidden relationship among the variables. This book will give you a rundown explaining what regression analysis is, explaining you the process from scratch. The first few chapters give an understanding of what the different types of learning are – supervised and unsupervised, how these learnings differ from each other. We then move to covering the supervised learning in details covering the various aspects of regression analysis. The outline of chapters are arranged in a way that gives a feel of all the steps covered in a data science process – loading the training dataset, handling missing values, EDA on the dataset, transformations and feature engineering, model building, assessing the model fitting and performance, and finally making predictions on unseen datasets. Each chapter starts with explaining the theoretical concepts and once the reader gets comfortable with the theory, we move to the practical examples to support the understanding. The practical examples are illustrated using R code including the different packages in R such as R Stats, Caret and so on. Each chapter is a mix of theory and practical examples. By the end of this book you will know all the concepts and pain-points related to regression analysis, and you will be able to implement your learning in your projects.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Data wrangling


Once data collection has been completed and imported into the R environment, it is finally time to start the analysis process. This is what a novice might think; conversely, we must first proceed to the preparation of data (data wrangling). This is a laborious process that can take a long time, in some cases about 80 percent of the entire data analysis process. However, it is a fundamental prerequisite for the rest of the data analysis workflow, so it is essential to acquire the best practices in such techniques.

Before submitting our data to any regression algorithm, we must be able to evaluate the quality and accuracy of our observations. If we cannot access the data stored in R correctly, or if we do not know how to switch from raw data to something that can be analyzed, we cannot go ahead.

A first look at data

Before passing our data to regression algorithms, we need to give a first look at what we've imported into the R environment to see if there are any issues. Often,...