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The Hows and Whys of Regression Analysis
Learn how linear regression can help you forecast the future
Machine learning experts have borrowed the methods of regression analysis from math because they allow the making of predictions with as little as just one known variable (as well as multiple variables). They’re useful for financial analysis, weather forecasting, medical diagnosis, and many other fields.
What’s Regression in Statistics?
Regression analysis determines the relationship between one dependent variable and a set of independent variables. This sounds a bit complicated, so let’s look at an example.
Imagine you run your own restaurant. You have a waiter who receives tips. The size of those tips usually correlates with the total sum for the meal. The bigger they are, the more expensive the meal was.
You have a list of order numbers and tips received. If you tried to reconstruct how large each meal was with just the tip data (a dependent variable), this would be an example of a simple-linear-regression analysis.
(This example was borrowed from the magnificent video by Brandon Foltz.)
A similar case would be trying to predict how much the apartment will cost based just on its size. While this…
