An introduction to regression modeling

The term regression, as used in regression analysis and linear regression, was first used by Sir Francis Galton and appeared in 1886 in his essay in Anthropological Miscellanea, Regression towards Mediocrity in Hereditary Stature (see https://galton.org/essays/1880-1889/galton-1886-jaigi-regression-stature.pdf, where he says he had already made an address in Aberdeen that had been published in Nature in September (www.nature.com)). We will visit arguably his most famous dataset in the next section, but in modern usage, regression can mean a large number of statistical methods to estimate a function that describes a set of data. In some cases, and especially in current data science practice, such models can also be used to make predictions on new data. Essentially, if data is of a continuous nature (meaning the data values can be any value between some range, or even unbounded), then regression methods are used to fit mathematical functions to...