Member-only story

Understanding Logistic Regression step by step

Training a logistic regression classifier to predict people’s gender based on their weight and height.

gustavo
TDS Archive
6 min readFeb 21, 2019

--

Logistic Regression is a popular statistical model used for binary classification, that is for predictions of the type this or that, yes or no, A or B, etc. Logistic regression can, however, be used for multiclass classification, but here we will focus on its simplest application.

As an example, consider the task of predicting someone’s gender (Male/Female) based on their Weight and Height.

For this, we will train a machine learning model from a data set of 10,000 samples of people’s weight and height. The data set is taken from the Conway & Myles Machine Learning for Hackers book, Chapter 2, and can it can be directly downloaded here.

This is a preview of what the data looks like:

Each sample contains three columns: Height, Weight, and Male.

  • Height in inches
  • Weight in pounds
  • Male: 1 means that the measurement corresponds to a male person, and 0 means…

--

--

TDS Archive
TDS Archive

Published in TDS Archive

An archive of data science, data analytics, data engineering, machine learning, and artificial intelligence writing from the former Towards Data Science Medium publication.

gustavo
gustavo

Written by gustavo

Data Science @ Medium. Views are my own.

No responses yet