# 15.1. Simple Linear Model¶

Modeling starts with an outcome variable $$y$$ and one or more predictor variables $$x$$. When $$y$$ is a numeric variable like height or income, we say that we’re doing regression. When $$y$$ is a categorical variable like the presidential candidate on a ballet, we say that we’re doing classification. We assume that $$x$$ is numeric 1.

When we use a simple linear model, we assume that the outcome $$y$$ depends linearly on a given predictor $$x$$ with some random measurement error $$\epsilon$$:

\begin{aligned} y = \theta_0 + \theta_1 x + \epsilon \end{aligned}

The simple linear model $$f_{\theta}(x)$$ doesn’t try to model the measurement error. Instead, it predicts $$y$$ for a single value of $$x$$:

\begin{aligned} f_{\theta}(x) = \theta_0 + \theta_1 x \end{aligned}

In the equations above, $$\theta_0$$ and $$\theta_1$$ are constants that we call the model parameters. It’s custom to say that the column vector $$\theta = [ \theta_0, \theta_1 ]$$. So, $$\theta$$ is a vector that contains all of the model parameters, and $$\theta_1$$ is a scalar that represents a single model parameter. The first steps in modeling are to pick $$x$$ and $$y$$, then figure out what $$\theta_0$$ and $$\theta_1$$ are.

Note

We’ll work with $$\epsilon$$ more rigorously in future chapters. For now, the important idea to remember is that the model depends on $$x$$. For example, when $$\theta_1$$ is positive, bigger values of $$x$$ make the prediction $$f_{\theta}(x)$$ bigger.

The simple linear model is useful because $$x$$ and $$y$$ can be any two variables of interest. In this chapter, we’ll use linear models to understand what factors contribute to economic opportunity in the US.

## 15.1.1. Data: Where is the Land of Opportunity?¶

The US was nicknamed “the land of opportunity” because people believed that even poor people in the US could end up wealthy—economists call this economic mobility. In a famous study, the economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues did a large-scale data analysis on economic mobility in the US . But Chetty had a hunch that some places in the US have much higher economic mobility than others. His analysis found this to be true. Cities like San Jose, Washington DC, and Seattle have higher mobility than places like Charlotte, Milwaukee, and Atlanta. This means that overall, more people move from low income to high income in San Jose compared to Charlotte. Chetty also used linear models to find out that social and economic factors like segregation, income inequality, and local school systems are related to economic mobility. In this chapter, we’ll use linear models to replicate parts of his analysis.

To do his analysis, Chetty used government tax records to get the incomes of everyone born in the US between 1980-82. He looked at each person’s income in 2011-12 when they were about 30 years old, and compared it to their parents’ income when they were born. In total, his dataset had about 10 million people. To define economic mobility, Chetty took the people who were born into the 25th income percentile and found the income percentile they ended up with 30 years later. He called this statistic the absolute upward mobility (AUM). If a region’s average AUM is 25, then people in the 25th percentile generally stay in the 25th percentile—they stay where they are. High AUM values mean that the region has high mobility. People in these regions generally make more than their parents. For reference, the US average AUM is about 41 at the time of this writing. Chetty averaged together the AUMs for regions of the US called commuting zones (CZ). Commuting zones are defined by the economy of a region and are on the same scale as counties. While individual income records can’t be publicly available because of privacy, the AUMs for each commuting zone are publicly available. Since Chetty also used commuting zone AUMs, we can replicate his analysis using publicly available data.

So, our outcome variable $$y$$ represents the AUM for a commuting zone. There are many possible predictor variables in Chetty’s data. For our first simple linear model, we’ll pick the predictor variable $$x$$ to be the fraction of people who have a 15-minute or shorter commute to work.

## 15.1.2. Predicting Upward Mobility using Commute Time¶

Let’s take a look at the Opportunity data. We’ll load the data into the df variable.

df = (
# filter out rows with NaN AUM values
.query('not aum.isnull()', engine='python')
)
df

cz czname stateabbrv aum ... cs_fam_wkidsinglemom cs_divorced cs_married incgrowth0010
0 100.0 Johnson City TN 38.39 ... 0.19 0.11 0.60 -2.28e-03
1 200.0 Morristown TN 37.78 ... 0.19 0.12 0.61 -2.15e-03
2 301.0 Middlesborough TN 39.05 ... 0.21 0.11 0.59 -3.71e-03
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
738 39302.0 Bellingham WA 44.12 ... 0.19 0.10 0.54 -6.95e-03
739 39303.0 Port Angeles WA 41.41 ... 0.24 0.12 0.60 4.91e-05
740 39400.0 Seattle WA 43.20 ... 0.19 0.12 0.54 -1.55e-03

709 rows × 43 columns

Each row in df represents one commuting zone. The column aum has the average AUM metric for each commuting zone. There are many columns in df since this dataframe also has the covariates for each CZ. For our simple linear model, we want the frac_traveltime_lt15 column which has the fraction of people in each CZ that have a 15 minute or shorter commute time. We’ll plot aum against frac_traveltime_lt15 to see the relationship between the two variables.

px.scatter(df, x='frac_traveltime_lt15', y='aum',
width=350, height=250)


Our model is $$f_{\theta}(x) = \theta_0 + \theta_1 x$$ where $$x$$ is the frac_traveltime_lt15 for a commuting zone and the predicted outcome $$y$$ is the aum. By looking at the scatter plot above, we can guess that $$\theta_1$$ should be positive since aum is bigger for bigger values of frac_traveltime_lt15. In the next section, we’ll use loss minimization to find $$\theta_0$$ and $$\theta_1$$ precisely.

1

Later in this chapter (Section 15.5) we’ll see ways of working with categorical predictor variables.