Performing Linear Regression with Python and Scikit-learn

Sometimes, life is easy. There are times when you are building a Machine Learning model for regression and you find your data to be linear. In other words, a regression model can be fit by means of a straight line. While these cases are relatively rare, linear regression is still a useful tool for in your Machine Learning toolkit.

What is Linear Regression? And how does it work? That's what we will investigate in today's Machine Learning article. It is structured as follows. First of all, we will be introducing Linear Regression conceptually, specifically Ordinary Least Squares based Linear Regression. We'll look at what regression is in the first place, and then introduce the linear variant - explaining the maths behind it in an intuitive way, so that it'll be entirely clear what is going on. We also cover how Linear Regression is performed, i.e., how after regressing a fit the model is improved, yielding better fits.

Subsequently, we'll move from theory into practice, and implement Linear Regression with Python by means of the Scikit-learn library. We will generate a dataset where a linear fit can be made, apply Scikit's LinearRegression for performing the Ordinary Least Squares fit, and show you with step-by-step examples how you can implement this yourself.

Let's take a look :)

Introducing Linear Regression

In this section, we will be looking at how Linear Regression is performed by means of an Ordinary Least Squares fit. For doing so, we will first take a look at regression in general - what is it, and how is it useful? Then, we'll move forward to Linear Regression, followed by looking at the different types for performing regression analysis linearly. Finally, we zoom in on the specific variant that we will be using in this article - Oridnary Least Squares based linear regression - and will explore how it works.

Of course, since we're dealing with a method for Machine Learning, we cannot fully move away from maths. However, I'm not a big fan of writing down a lot of equations without explaining them. For this reason, we'll explain the math in terms of intuitions, so that even though when you cannot fully read the equations, you will understand what is going on.

What is Regression?

Most generally, we can define regression as follows:

Regression analysis is a set of statistical processes for estimating the relationships between a dependent variable (often called the 'outcome variable') and one or more independent variables (often called 'predictors', 'covariates', or 'features').

In other words, suppose that we have the following dataset:

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