How to iterate over columns of pandas dataframe to run regression

Question

I\'m sure this is simple, but as a complete newbie to python, I\'m having trouble figuring out how to iterate over variables in a pandas dataframe and run a regress

Answer 1

I'm a bit late but here's how I did this. The steps:

1. Create a list of all columns
2. Use itertools to take x combinations
3. Append each result R squared value to a result dataframe along with excluded column list
4. Sort the result DF in descending order of R squared to see which is the best fit.

This is the code I used on DataFrame called aft_tmt. Feel free to extrapolate to your use case..

import pandas as pd
# setting options to print without truncating output
pd.set_option('display.max_columns', None)
pd.set_option('display.max_colwidth', None)

import statsmodels.formula.api as smf
import itertools

# This section gets the column names of the DF and removes some columns which I don't want to use as predictors.
itercols = aft_tmt.columns.tolist()
itercols.remove("sc97")
itercols.remove("sc")
itercols.remove("grc")
itercols.remove("grc97")
print itercols
len(itercols)

# results DF
regression_res = pd.DataFrame(columns = ["Rsq", "predictors", "excluded"])

# excluded cols
exc = []

# change 9 to the number of columns you want to combine from N columns.
#Possibly run an outer loop from 0 to N/2?
for x in itertools.combinations(itercols, 9):
    lmstr = "+".join(x)
    m = smf.ols(formula = "sc ~ " + lmstr, data = aft_tmt)
    f = m.fit()
    exc = [item for item in x if item not in itercols]
    regression_res = regression_res.append(pd.DataFrame([[f.rsquared, lmstr, "+".join([y for y in itercols if y not in list(x)])]], columns = ["Rsq", "predictors", "excluded"]))

regression_res.sort_values(by="Rsq", ascending = False)