Project Overview
We’ll explore three key regression techniques: Ridge Regression, Lasso Regression, and Linear Regression. Continuous values, given in input data, are predicted with these models. Ridge and Lasso are linear regression versions (with regularization), capturing simple relationships between variables but making such relationships more robust to noise in the data. Using Python and NumPy library, we’ll go through data pre-processing, model building, model validation, and optimization techniques. By the end of the course, you’ll also have a solid grasp of how to use these regression models on real data and enhance your ML projects.
Prerequisites
Learners must develop some skills before undertaking this project. Here’s what you should ideally know:
- Understanding of basic knowledge of Python for data analysis and manipulation
- Knowledge of libraries such as Pandas, Numpy, and Matplotlib for data manipulation and data visualization respectively.
- Understanding of data preprocessing steps such as how to deal with missing values, normalization, and scaling.
- Familiarity with exploratory data analysis (EDA) to find out patterns and growing trends in sets.
- Elementary concepts about regression models to learn how predictive modeling works
- Machine learning frameworks such as Scikit-Learn for building, training, and assessing models
Approach:
In this project, we predict laptop prices using multiple regression models. We first loaded the dataset and cleaned it, handling the missing values and feature selection. OneHotEncoder is used for encoding categorical variables while StandardScaler is used to standardize for numerical features. Then the data is split into training and testing sets. Three trained models using Linear Regression, Lasso Regression, and Ridge Regression on the training set are run on the training set. Metrics like MAE, MSE, R2, and RMSE are the evaluation of each model. The performance of the models is compared and a classification report is generated by predicting prices as binary labels. The results are shown in a comparison table and through bar plots to compare the results of different models.
Workflow and Methodology
Workflow:
- Data Collection: Collect the dataset from the public dataset repository, and load it into a DataFrame in Pandas for further analysis.
- Data Cleaning: You need to deal with missing values, check that the right data type is used, and all the data is ready for modeling.
- Feature Engineering: We transform some existing ones (categorical variables encoding) for better results on the model using OneHotEncoder.
- Data Scaling: To get the best performance for your model, you have to scale the numerical data with StandardScaler.
- Train-Test Split: Split the dataset into training and testing sets to evaluate model performance.
- Model Building: Train regression models (Linear, Lasso, Ridge) using the prepared data.
- Model Evaluation: Evaluate the models using metrics like MAE, MSE, R2, and RMSE.
- Model Comparison: Compare model performance by analyzing evaluation metrics for each model.
Methodology:
- Data Preprocessing: For categorical features, we use OneHotEncoding and for numerical features, we scale it using StandardScaler to ensure uniformity for models.
- Model Selection: We preprocessed data and chose and trained Linear Regression, Lasso Regression, and Ridge Regression models.
- Model Evaluation: Use the evaluation function to evaluate the model’s performance on the test set using MAE, MSE, R2, and RMSE.
- Classification Report: Convert regression output into binary and get a classification report for the binary classification task.
- Model Comparison: Compare the models using a comparison table and visualization (like a bar plot) using evaluation metrics.
Data Collection and Preparation
Data Collection:
In this project, we collected the dataset from a public repository. If you are looking to work on a real-world problem, you can get these kinds of datasets from publicly available repositories such as Kaggle, UCI Machine Learning Repository, or company-specific data. We will provide the dataset in this project so that you can work on the same dataset.
Data Preparation:
The Dataset is loaded on a Pandas DataFrame for easy preparation and analysis. We identified and handled missing values by removing rows having a large proportion of missing data. Features are chosen for the regression models to ensure that only relevant ones are taken to skip the unnecessary or redundant ones. OneHotEncoder encodes categorical variables into a format that the machine learning models can work with. Then we standardize numerical features to represent all features on a similar scale using StandardScaler. Finally train_test_split() splits the data into training and testing sets to let our model be evaluated on unseen data.