R and statistical regression
Before we jump right into our modeling, let's take a moment to validate the use of R as our statistical modeling tool.
R is an open-source statistical environment and a powerful programming language that continues to be one of the most popular choices for statistical modeling. Modeled after S and S-Plus, R has an ever-growing, widespread audience as is well maintained by the R core-development team (an international team of volunteer developers).
R and many related resources can easily be found online along with detailed directions for downloading the software, accompanying packages and other sources of documentation. In addition, there are a ton of specialized routines that have been written for R by people all over the world and made freely available as R packages.
Since R is a programming language, it brings the power of programming to your project, but it does require some expertise with the tool. Thankfully, it offers a graphical user interface (GUI) to make...