Summary

At the beginning of this chapter, you learned about using simple linear regression analysis to model the relationship between a single explanatory variable and a continuous response variable. We then discussed a useful explanatory data analysis technique to look at patterns and anomalies in data, which is an important first step in predictive modeling tasks.

We built our first model by implementing linear regression using a gradient-based optimization approach. We then saw how to utilize scikit-learn's linear models for regression and also implement a robust regression technique (RANSAC) as an approach for dealing with outliers. To assess the predictive performance of regression models, we computed the mean sum of squared errors and the related metric. Furthermore, we also discussed a useful graphical approach to diagnose the problems of regression models: the residual plot.

After we discussed how regularization can be applied to regression models to reduce the model complexity and...