Fitting a line through data

Now we will start with some basic modeling with linear regression. Traditional linear regression is the first, and therefore, probably the most fundamental model—a straight line through data.

Intuitively, it is familiar to a lot of the population: a change in one input variable proportionally changes the output variable. It is important that many people will have seen it in school, or in a newspaper data graphic, or in a presentation at work, and so on, as it will be easy for you to explain to colleagues and investors.

Getting ready

The Boston dataset is perfect to play around with regression. The Boston dataset has the median home price of several areas in Boston. It also has other factors that might impact housing prices, for example, crime rate. First, import the datasets model, then we can load the dataset:

from sklearn import datasets
boston = datasets.load_boston()

How to do it...

Actually, using linear regression in scikit-learn is quite simple. The API for linear...