Regression Analysis in Machine learning

Regression analysis is a statistical method to model the relationship between a dependent

(target) and independent (predictor) variables with one or more independent variables.
More specifically, Regression analysis helps us to understand how the value of the
dependent variable is changing corresponding to an independent variable when other
independent variables are held fixed. It predicts continuous/real values such
as temperature, age, salary, price, etc.

We can understand the concept of regression analysis using the below example:

Example: Suppose there is a marketing company A, who does various advertisement

every year and get sales on that. The below list shows the advertisement made by the
company in the last 5 years and the corresponding sales:

Now, the company wants to do the advertisement of $200 in the year 2019 and wants to
know the prediction about the sales for this year. So to solve such type of prediction
problems in machine learning, we need regression analysis.

Regression is a supervised learning technique which helps in finding the correlation between
variables and enables us to predict the continuous output variable based on the one or
more predictor variables. It is mainly used for prediction, forecasting, time series
modeling, and determining the causal-effect relationship between variables.
In Regression, we plot a graph between the variables which best fits the given datapoints,
using this plot, the machine learning model can make predictions about the data. In
simple words, "Regression shows a line or curve that passes through all the
datapoints on target-predictor graph in such a way that the vertical distance
between the datapoints and the regression line is minimum." The distance between
datapoints and line tells whether a model has captured a strong relationship or not.

Some examples of regression can be as:

o Prediction of rain using temperature and other factors

o Determining Market trends
o Prediction of road accidents due to rash driving.

Terminologies Related to the Regression Analysis:

o Dependent Variable: The main factor in Regression analysis which we want to
predict or understand is called the dependent variable. It is also called target
variable.
o Independent Variable: The factors which affect the dependent variables or which
are used to predict the values of the dependent variables are called independent
variable, also called as a predictor.
o Outliers: Outlier is an observation which contains either very low value or very high
value in comparison to other observed values. An outlier may hamper the result,
so it should be avoided.
o Multicollinearity: If the independent variables are highly correlated with each
other than other variables, then such condition is called Multicollinearity. It should
not be present in the dataset, because it creates problem while ranking the most
affecting variable.
o Underfitting and Overfitting: If our algorithm works well with the training dataset
but not well with test dataset, then such problem is called Overfitting. And if our
algorithm does not perform well even with training dataset, then such problem is
called underfitting.
Why do we use Regression Analysis?
As mentioned above, Regression analysis helps in the prediction of a continuous variable.
There are various scenarios in the real world where we need some future predictions such
as weather condition, sales prediction, marketing trends, etc., for such case we need some
technology which can make predictions more accurately. So for such case we need
Regression analysis which is a statistical method and used in machine learning and data
science. Below are some other reasons for using Regression analysis:

o Regression estimates the relationship between the target and the independent
variable.
o It is used to find the trends in data.
o It helps to predict real/continuous values.
o By performing the regression, we can confidently determine the most important
factor, the least important factor, and how each factor is affecting the other
factors.

Types of Regression
There are various types of regressions which are used in data science and machine
learning. Each type has its own importance on different scenarios, but at the core, all the
regression methods analyze the effect of the independent variable on dependent
variables. Here we are discussing some important types of regression which are given
below:

o Linear Regression
o Logistic Regression
o Polynomial Regression
o Support Vector Regression
o Decision Tree Regression
o Random Forest Regression
o Ridge Regression
o Lasso Regression:
Linear Regression:

o Linear regression is a statistical regression method which is used for predictive

analysis.
o It is one of the very simple and easy algorithms which works on regression and
shows the relationship between the continuous variables.
o It is used for solving the regression problem in machine learning.
o Linear regression shows the linear relationship between the independent variable
(X-axis) and the dependent variable (Y-axis), hence called linear regression.
o If there is only one input variable (x), then such linear regression is called simple
linear regression. And if there is more than one input variable, then such linear
regression is called multiple linear regression.
o The relationship between variables in the linear regression model can be explained
using the below image. Here we are predicting the salary of an employee on the
basis of the year of experience.
 o Below is the mathematical equation for Linear regression:

1. Y= aX+b

Here,

Y= dependent variables (target variables),

X= Independent variables (predictor variables), a and b are the linear coefficients

Some popular applications of linear regression are:

o Analyzing trends and sales estimates

o Salary forecasting
o Real estate prediction
o Arriving at ETAs in traffic.
Logistic Regression:

o Logistic regression is another supervised learning algorithm which is used to solve

the classification problems. In classification problems, we have dependent
variables in a binary or discrete format such as 0 or 1.
o Logistic regression algorithm works with the categorical variable such as 0 or 1, Yes
or No, True or False, Spam or not spam, etc.
o It is a predictive analysis algorithm which works on the concept of probability.
o Logistic regression is a type of regression, but it is different from the linear
regression algorithm in the term how they are used.
o Logistic regression uses sigmoid function or logistic function which is a complex
cost function. This sigmoid function is used to model the data in logistic regression.
The function can be represented as:

o f(x)= Output between the 0 and 1 value.

o x= input to the function
o e= base of natural logarithm.

When we provide the input values (data) to the function, it gives the S-curve as follows:
 o It uses the concept of threshold levels, values above the threshold level are
rounded up to 1, and values below the threshold level are rounded up to 0.

There are three types of logistic regression:

o Binary(0/1, pass/fail)
o Multi(cats, dogs, lions)
o Ordinal(low, medium, high)

Polynomial Regression:

o Polynomial Regression is a type of regression which models the non-linear

dataset using a linear model.
o It is similar to multiple linear regression, but it fits a non-linear curve between the
value of x and corresponding conditional values of y.
o Suppose there is a dataset which consists of datapoints which are present in a non-
linear fashion, so for such case, linear regression will not best fit to those
datapoints. To cover such datapoints, we need Polynomial regression.
o In Polynomial regression, the original features are transformed into
polynomial features of given degree and then modeled using a linear
model. Which means the datapoints are best fitted using a polynomial line.
 o The equation for polynomial regression also derived from linear regression
equation that means Linear regression equation Y= b0+ b1x, is transformed into
Polynomial regression equation Y= b0+b1x+ b2x2+ b3x3+.....+ bnxn.
o Here Y is the predicted/target output, b0, b1,... bn are the regression
coefficients. x is our independent/input variable.
o The model is still linear as the coefficients are still linear with quadratic

Note: This is different from Multiple Linear regression in such a way that in Polynomial
regression, a single element has different degrees instead of multiple variables with the same
degree.

Support Vector Regression:

Support Vector Machine is a supervised learning algorithm which can be used for
regression as well as classification problems. So if we use it for regression problems, then
it is termed as Support Vector Regression.

Support Vector Regression is a regression algorithm which works for continuous variables.
Below are some keywords which are used in Support Vector Regression:

o Kernel: It is a function used to map a lower-dimensional data into higher

dimensional data.
o Hyperplane: In general SVM, it is a separation line between two classes, but in
SVR, it is a line which helps to predict the continuous variables and cover most of
the datapoints.
o Boundary line: Boundary lines are the two lines apart from hyperplane, which
creates a margin for datapoints.
o Support vectors: Support vectors are the datapoints which are nearest to the
hyperplane and opposite class.

In SVR, we always try to determine a hyperplane with a maximum margin, so that

maximum number of datapoints are covered in that margin. The main goal of SVR is to
consider the maximum datapoints within the boundary lines and the hyperplane
(best-fit line) must contain a maximum number of datapoints. Consider the below
image:
Here, the blue line is called hyperplane, and the other two lines are known as boundary
lines.

Decision Tree Regression:

o Decision Tree is a supervised learning algorithm which can be used for solving both
classification and regression problems.
o It can solve problems for both categorical and numerical data
o Decision Tree regression builds a tree-like structure in which each internal node
represents the "test" for an attribute, each branch represent the result of the test,
and each leaf node represents the final decision or result.
o A decision tree is constructed starting from the root node/parent node (dataset),
which splits into left and right child nodes (subsets of dataset). These child nodes
are further divided into their children node, and themselves become the parent
node of those nodes. Consider the below image:
Above image showing the example of Decision Tee regression, here, the model is trying
to predict the choice of a person between Sports cars or Luxury car.

o Random forest is one of the most powerful supervised learning algorithms which
is capable of performing regression as well as classification tasks.
o The Random Forest regression is an ensemble learning method which combines
multiple decision trees and predicts the final output based on the average of each
tree output. The combined decision trees are called as base models, and it can be
represented more formally as:

g(x)= f0(x)+ f1(x)+ f2(x)+....

o Random forest uses Bagging or Bootstrap Aggregation technique of ensemble

learning in which aggregated decision tree runs in parallel and do not interact with
each other.
o With the help of Random Forest regression, we can prevent Overfitting in the
model by creating random subsets of the dataset.
Ridge Regression:

o Ridge regression is one of the most robust versions of linear regression in which a
small amount of bias is introduced so that we can get better long term predictions.
o The amount of bias added to the model is known as Ridge Regression penalty.
We can compute this penalty term by multiplying with the lambda to the squared
weight of each individual features.
o The equation for ridge regression will be:

o A general linear or polynomial regression will fail if there is high collinearity

between the independent variables, so to solve such problems, Ridge regression
can be used.
 o Ridge regression is a regularization technique, which is used to reduce the
complexity of the model. It is also called as L2 regularization.
o It helps to solve the problems if we have more parameters than samples.

Lasso Regression:

o Lasso regression is another regularization technique to reduce the complexity of

the model.
o It is similar to the Ridge Regression except that penalty term contains only the
absolute weights instead of a square of weights.
o Since it takes absolute values, hence, it can shrink the slope to 0, whereas Ridge
Regression can only shrink it near to 0.
o It is also called as L1 regularization. The equation for Lasso regression will be: