In this chapter, we're going to look at what predictive modeling is and how it uses statistics to predict outcomes from existing data. We'll cover real world examples to understand the concepts better. We'll see what regression analysis means and analyze some of its forms in detail. We'll also look at an example which predicts the price of a car for us.

These are the topics that we'll cover in this chapter:

• Linear regression and how to implement it in Python
• Polynomial regression, its application and examples
• Multivariate regression and how to implement it in Python
• An example we'll build that predicts the price of a car using Python
• The concept of multi-level models and some things to know about them