A Beginner's Guide to Regression Analysis in Machine Learning

In order to understand the motivation behind regression, let's consider the following simple example. The scatter plot below shows the number of college graduates in the US from the year 2001 to 2012. Now based on the available data, what if someone asks you how many college graduates with master's degrees will there be in the year 2018? It can be seen that the number of college graduates with master's degrees increases almost linearly with the year. So by simple visual analysis, we can get a rough estimate of that number to be between 2.0 to 2.1 million.