Using ridge regression to overcome linear regression's shortfalls

In this recipe, we'll learn about ridge regression. It is different from vanilla linear regression; it introduces a regularization parameter to shrink coefficients. This is useful when the dataset has collinear factors.

Ridge regression is actually so powerful in the presence of collinearity that you can model polynomial features: vectors x, x², x³, ... which are highly collinear and correlated.

Getting ready

Let's load a dataset that has a low effective rank and compare ridge regression with linear regression by way of the coefficients. If you're not familiar with rank, it's the smaller of the linearly independent columns and the linearly...