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

Summary


In this chapter, we were introduced to the basic concepts of regression analysis, and then we discovered different types of statistical processes. Starting from the origin of the term regression, we explored the meaning of this type of analysis. We have therefore gone through analyzing the real cases in which it is possible to extract knowledge from the data at our disposal.

Then, we analyzed how to build regression models step by step. Each step of the workflow was analyzed to understand the meaning and the operations to be performed. Particular emphasis was devoted to the generalization ability of the regression model, which is crucial for all other machine learning algorithms. 

We explored the fundamentals of regression analysis and correlation analysis, which allows us to study the relationships between variables. We understood the differences between these two types of analysis.  

In addition, an introduction, background information, and basic knowledge of the R environment were covered. Finally, we explored a number of essential packages that R provides for understanding the amazing world of regression.

In the next chapter, we will approach regression with the simplest algorithm: simple linear regression. First, we will describe a regression problem in terms of where to fit a regressor and then we will provide some intuitions underneath the math formulation. Then, the reader will learn how to tune the model for high performance and deeply understand every parameter of it. Finally, some tricks will be described to lower the complexity and scale the approach.