Indeed, logistic regression is one of the most important analytic tools in the social and natural sciences. In natural language processing, logistic regression is the baseline supervised machine learning algorithm for classification, and also has a very close relationship with neural networks. As we will see in Chapter 7, a neural network can be viewed as a series of logistic regression classifiers stacked on top of each other. Thus the classification and machine learning techniques introduced here will play an important role throughout the book.