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

Feature selection


In general, when we work with high-dimensional datasets, it is a good idea to reduce the number of features to only the most useful ones and discard the rest. This can lead to simpler models that generalize better. Feature selection is the process of reducing inputs for processing and analyzing or identifying the most significant features over the others. This selection of features is necessary to create a functional model, so as to achieve a reduction in cardinality, imposing a limit greater than the number of features that must be considered during its creation. In the following figure, a general scheme of a feature selection process is shown:

Usually, the data contains redundant information, or more than the necessary information; in other cases, it may contain incorrect information. Feature selection makes the process of creating a model more efficient, for example, decreasing the load on the CPU and the memory needed to train the algorithm. Moreover, selection of features...