Scala: Guide for Data Science Professionals

An example – logistic regression

Let's now imagine we want to build a classifier that takes a person's height and weight and assigns a probability to their being Male or Female. We will reuse the height and weight data introduced earlier in this chapter. Let's start by plotting the dataset:

Height versus weight data for 181 men and women

There are many different algorithms for classification. A first glance at the data shows that we can, approximately, separate men from women by drawing a straight line across the plot. A linear method is therefore a reasonable initial attempt at classification. In this section, we will use logistic regression to build ...