How to forecast using Regression Analysis in R

Regression is the first technique you'll learn in most analytics books. It is a very useful and simple form of supervised learning used to predict a quantitative response. By building a regression model to predict the value of Y, you're trying to get an equation like this for an output, Y given inputs x1, x2, x3… Sometimes there may be terms of the form b4x1.x2 b5.x1 2… that add to the accuracy of the regression model. The trick is to apply some intuition as to what terms could help determine Y and then test the intuition. Scatter plots can help you tease out these relationships as we will show in the R section below.