Hands-On Machine Learning on Google Cloud Platform

Identifying a trend in a time series

If we want to try a prediction of milk production in the next January, we can think in the following way: with the acquired data, we can trace the trend line and extend it until the following January. In this way, we would have a rough estimate of milk production that we should expect in the immediate future.

But tracing a trend line means tracing the regression line. The linear regression method consists of precisely identifying a line that is capable of representing point distribution in a two-dimensional plane. As is easy to imagine, if the points corresponding to the observations are near the line, then the chosen model will be able to effectively describe the link between the variables. In theory, ...