Regression Analysis Tutorial and Examples

Minitab Blog Editor | 12 December, 2013

Topics: Regression Analysis

This tutorial covers many aspects of regression analysis including: choosing the type of regression analysis to use, specifying the model, interpreting the results, determining how well the model fits, making predictions, and checking the assumptions. At the end, I include examples of different types of regression analyses.

Why Choose Regression and the Hallmarks of a Good Regression Analysis

Before we begin the regression analysis tutorial, there are several important questions to answer.

Why should we choose regression at all? What are the common mistakes that even experts make when it comes to regression analysis? And, how do you distinguish a good regression analysis from a less rigorous regression analysis? Read these posts to find out:

Tutorial: How to Choose the Correct Type of Regression Analysis

Minitab's regression menuMinitab statistical software provides a number of different types of regression analysis. Choosing the correct type depends on the characteristics of your data, as the following posts explain.

Tutorial: How to Specify Your Regression Model

Fitting a curved relationship with MinitabChoosing the correct type of regression analysis is just the first step in this regression tutorial. Next, you need to specify the model. Model specification consists of determining which predictor variables to include in the model and whether you need to model curvature and interactions between predictor variables.

Specifying a regression model is an iterative process. The interpretation and assumption verification sections of this regression tutorial show you how to confirm that you’ve specified the model correctly and how to adjust your model based on the results.

Tutorial: How to Interpret your Regression Results

So, you’ve chosen the correct type of regression and specified the model. Now, you want to interpret the results. The following topics in the regression tutorial show you how to interpret the results and effectively present them:

Tutorial: How to Use Regression to Make Predictions

How to predict with MinitabIn addition to determining how the response variable changes when you change the values of the predictor variables, the other key benefit of regression is the ability to make predictions. In this part of the regression tutorial, I cover how to do just this.

  • How to Predict with Minitab: A prediction guide that uses BMI to predict body fat percentage.
  • Predicted R-squared: This statistic indicates how well a regression model predicts responses for new observations rather than just the original data set.
  • Prediction intervals: See how presenting prediction intervals is better than presenting only the regression equation and predicted values.
  • Prediction intervals versus other intervals: I compare prediction intervals to confidence and tolerance intervals so you’ll know when to use each type of interval.

Tutorial: How to Check the Regression Assumptions and Fix Problems

Illustration of residualsLike any statistical test, regression analysis has assumptions that you should satisfy, or the results can be invalid. In regression analysis, the main way to check the assumptions is to assess the residual plots. The following posts in the tutorial show you how to do this and offer suggestions for how to fix problems.

  • Residual plots: What they should look like and reasons why they might not!
  • How important are normal residuals: If you have a large enough sample, nonnormal residuals may not be a problem.
  • Multicollinearity: Highly correlated predictors can be a problem, but not always!
  • Heteroscedasticity: You want the residuals to have a constant variance (homoscedasticity), but what if they don’t?
  • Box-Cox transformation: If you can’t resolve the underlying problem, Cody Steele shows how easy it can be to transform the problem away!

Examples of Different Types of Regression Analyses

The final part of the regression tutorial contains examples of the different types of regression analysis that Minitab can perform. Many of these regression examples include the data sets so you can try it yourself!