Building Statistical Models in Python

8

Discrete Models

In the previous two chapters, we discussed models for predicting a continuous response variable. In this chapter, we will begin discussing models for predicting discrete response variables. We will start by discussing the probit and logit models for predicting binary outcome variables (categorical variables with two levels). Then, we will extend this idea to predicting categorical variables with multiple levels. Finally, we will look at predicting count variables, which are like categorical variables but only take values of integers and have an infinite number of levels.

In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:

• Probit and logit models
• Multinomial logit model
• Poisson model
• The negative binomial regression ...