Chapter 7. Regression – Recommendations

You have probably learned about regression already in high school mathematics class, this was probably called ordinary least squares (OLS) regression then. This centuries old technique is fast to run and can be effectively used for many real-world problems. In this chapter, we will start by reviewing OLS regression and showing you how it is available in both NumPy and scikit-learn.

In various modern problems, we run into limitations of the classical methods and start to benefit from more advanced methods, which we will see later in this chapter. This is particularly true when we have many features, including when we have more features than examples (which is something that ordinary least squares cannot handle correctly). These techniques are much more modern, with major developments happening in the last decade. They go by names such as lasso, ridge, or elastic nets. We will go into these in detail.

Finally, we will start looking at recommendations....