Big Data Analytics - Logistic Regression

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Logistic regression is a classification model in which the response variable is categorical. It is an algorithm that comes from statistics and is used for supervised classification problems. In logistic regression we seek to find the vector β of parameters in the following equation that minimize the cost function.

$$logit(p_i) = ln \left ( \frac{p_i}{1 - p_i} \right ) = \beta_0 + \beta_1x_{1,i} + ... + \beta_kx_{k,i}$$

The following code demonstrates how to fit a logistic regression model in R. We will use here the spam dataset to demonstrate logistic regression, the same that was used for Naive Bayes.

From the predictions results in terms of accuracy, we find that the regression model achieves a 92.5% accuracy in the test set, compared to the 72% achieved by the Naive Bayes classifier.

library(ElemStatLearn)
head(spam) 

# Split dataset in training and testing 
inx = sample(nrow(spam), round(nrow(spam) * 0.8)) 
train = spam[inx,] 
test = spam[-inx,]  

# Fit regression model 
fit = glm(spam ~ ., data = train, family = binomial()) 
summary(fit)  

# Call: 
#   glm(formula = spam ~ ., family = binomial(), data = train) 
#  

# Deviance Residuals:  
#   Min       1Q   Median       3Q      Max   
# -4.5172  -0.2039   0.0000   0.1111   5.4944
# Coefficients: 
# Estimate Std. Error z value Pr(>|z|)     
# (Intercept) -1.511e+00  1.546e-01  -9.772  < 2e-16 *** 
# A.1         -4.546e-01  2.560e-01  -1.776 0.075720 .   
# A.2         -1.630e-01  7.731e-02  -2.108 0.035043 *   
# A.3          1.487e-01  1.261e-01   1.179 0.238591     
# A.4          2.055e+00  1.467e+00   1.401 0.161153     
# A.5          6.165e-01  1.191e-01   5.177 2.25e-07 *** 
# A.6          7.156e-01  2.768e-01   2.585 0.009747 **  
# A.7          2.606e+00  3.917e-01   6.652 2.88e-11 *** 
# A.8          6.750e-01  2.284e-01   2.955 0.003127 **  
# A.9          1.197e+00  3.362e-01   3.559 0.000373 *** 
# Signif. codes:  0 *** 0.001 ** 0.01 * 0.05 . 0.1  1  

### Make predictions 
preds = predict(fit, test, type = ’response’) 
preds = ifelse(preds > 0.5, 1, 0) 
tbl = table(target = test$spam, preds) 
tbl 

#         preds 
# target    0   1 
# email   535  23 
# spam     46 316 
sum(diag(tbl)) / sum(tbl) 
# 0.925