Chapter 8. Model Abuse
Let’s move on to regression. Regression in its simplest form is fitting a straight line to data: finding the equation of the line that best predicts the outcome from the data. With this equation, you can use a measurement, such as body mass index, to predict an outcome like blood pressure or medical costs.
Usually regression uses more than one predictor variable. Instead of just body mass index, you might add age, gender, amount of regular exercise, and so on. Once you collect medical data from a representative sample of patients, the regression procedure would use the data to find the best equation to represent the relationship between the predictors and the outcome.
As we saw in Chapter 7, regression with multiple variables ...
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