“3 steps to Really Understand Logistic Regression”

Pasquale Di Lorenzo
5 min readJan 13, 2023

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Introduction to Logistic Regression

Logistic Regression is a statistical technique for predicting binary outcomes, such as whether an email is spam or not, whether a customer will churn or not, and whether a patient has a disease or not. It is a supervised learning algorithm that falls under the category of Generalized Linear Models (GLMs). Logistic Regression is one of the most widely used algorithms in Machine Learning and is considered a simple yet powerful tool for solving binary classification problems.

The main goal of Logistic Regression is to find the best fitting model to describe the relationship between the dependent variable (also known as the outcome or target variable) and one or more independent variables (also known as features or predictors). The dependent variable is typically binary, taking on values of 0 or 1, while the independent variables can be continuous or categorical. Logistic Regression models the probability of the dependent variable being equal to 1 as a function of the independent variables.

The key concepts of Logistic Regression include maximum likelihood estimation, decision boundaries, and odds ratios. Maximum likelihood estimation is used to estimate the coefficients of the independent variables, which are used to determine the decision boundaries. Decision boundaries are the line or curve that separates the observations with the dependent variable equal to 1 from the observations with the dependent variable equal to 0. Odds ratios are used to interpret the effect of the independent variables on the dependent variable.

It’s important to note that Logistic Regression has some assumptions and limitations that should be considered before using it in practice. One assumption is that the relationship between the dependent variable and independent variables is linear. Logistic Regression also assumes that the data is independent and that there is no multicollinearity among the independent variables. In addition, Logistic Regression is not suitable for handling non-binary dependent variables or categorical independent variables with more than two levels.

In conclusion, Logistic Regression is a widely used and powerful algorithm for solving binary classification problems. It models the probability of the dependent variable being equal to 1 as a function of the independent variables using maximum likelihood estimation and decision boundaries. However, it has some assumptions and limitations that should be considered before using it in practice.

Logistic Regression in Text Classification

In this chapter, we will show an example of how Logistic Regression can be applied to a common text classification task using a dataset of movie reviews. We will discuss the preprocessing steps and how to vectorize the text data. We will also show how to train a Logistic Regression model and evaluate its performance.

One of the most popular applications of Logistic Regression is in text classification, such as sentiment analysis. Sentiment analysis is the task of determining the sentiment or emotion of a given text, such as whether it is positive, negative, or neutral. In this example, we will use a dataset of movie reviews that contains 25,000 reviews for training and 25,000 reviews for testing. The dataset is structured as test set and training set of 25000 files each .

The first step in text classification is preprocessing the data, which includes cleaning and normalizing the text. We will also use a common technique in text classification called the Bag of Words model, which represents each text as a vector of the frequency of the words in the text. This will be done using the CountVectorizer class from the sklearn library.

Once the data is preprocessed and vectorized, we can train a Logistic Regression model using the vectorized training data and the corresponding sentiment labels. We will use the LogisticRegression class from the sklearn library to train the model.

Finally, we will evaluate the performance of the model by predicting the sentiment of the test data using the trained model and comparing the predictions with the actual sentiment labels. One of the most common metrics used to evaluate the performance of a classification model is accuracy, which is the ratio of correct predictions to the total number of predictions. We can use the accuracy_score function from the sklearn library to calculate the accuracy of the model.

It’s also worth noting that logistic regression also provides a probability estimate of the class membership. This can be useful in certain applications such as anomaly detection, where you want to identify low-probability predictions.

In summary, this chapter demonstrates how Logistic Regression can be applied to a common text classification task of sentiment analysis using a movie reviews dataset. We discussed the preprocessing steps, vectorization of the text data, training of a Logistic Regression model and the evaluation of the model’s performance. Logistic Regression is a simple yet powerful algorithm for text classification task and this example shows how easy it is to implement.

Code Example of Logistic Regression in Python

In this chapter, we will provide a detailed code example of how to implement Logistic Regression in Python using the movie reviews dataset discussed in the previous chapter. We will also explain the code and provide a brief overview of the libraries used.

The code example will cover the following steps:

  1. Importing the necessary libraries, such as pandas, sklearn and numpy.
  2. Loading the movie reviews dataset into a pandas dataframe.
  3. Splitting the dataset into training and testing sets.
  4. Creating the CountVectorizer object and fitting it to the training data.
  5. Transforming the training and testing data into feature vectors.
  6. Creating the LogisticRegression object and fitting it to the training data.
  7. Predicting the sentiment of the test data using the trained model.
  8. Calculating the accuracy of the model.
# Importing Libraries
import pandas as pd
from sklearn.feature_extraction.text import CountVectorizer
from sklearn.linear_model import LogisticRegression
from sklearn.metrics import accuracy_score

# Load the dataset
data = pd.read_csv('movie_reviews.csv')

# Split the dataset into training and testing sets
train_data = data[:25000]
test_data = data[25000:]

# Create the vectorizer
vectorizer = CountVectorizer(binary=True)

# Fit the vectorizer to the training data
vectorizer.fit(train_data['review'])

# Transform the training and testing data into feature vectors
train_features = vectorizer.transform(train_data['review'])
test_features = vectorizer.transform(test_data['review'])

# Create the Logistic Regression model
model = LogisticRegression()

# Fit the model to the training data
model.fit(train_features, train_data['sentiment'])

# Predict the sentiment of the test data
predictions = model.predict(test_features)

# Calculate the accuracy of the model
accuracy = accuracy_score(test_data['sentiment'], predictions)
print('Accuracy:', accuracy)

The code example demonstrates how to implement Logistic Regression in Python using the movie reviews dataset. We first loaded the dataset into a pandas dataframe and split it into training and testing sets. We then created the CountVectorizer object and fitted it to the training data. This is used to convert the text data into numerical feature vectors. After that we created the LogisticRegression object and fitted it to the training data. We used the trained model to predict the sentiment of the test data and calculated the accuracy of the model using the accuracy_score function.

It’s important to note that this is just one example of how Logistic Regression can be implemented in Python and used in text classification. There are many other libraries and techniques that can be used in addition to or instead of the ones shown in this example. The key takeaway is that Logistic Regression is a powerful algorithm that can be easily implemented in Python to solve a variety of classification problems.

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Pasquale Di Lorenzo

As a physicist and Data engineer ishare insights on AI and personal growth to inspire others to reach their full potential.