Often we want to know more than just the correct classification of an observation. We want to know why the classifier made the decision it did. That is, we want our decision to be interpretable. Interpretability can be hard to define strictly, but the interpretable core idea is that as humans we should know why our algorithms reach the conclusions they do. Because the features to logistic regression are often human-designed, one way to understand a classifier's decision is to understand the role each feature plays in the decision. Logistic regression can be combined with statistical tests (the likelihood ratio test, or the Wald test); investigating whether a particular feature is significant by one of these tests, or inspecting its magnitude (how large is the weight w associated with the feature?) can help us interpret why the classifier made the decision it makes. This is enormously important for building transparent models. Furthermore, in addition to its use as a classifier, logistic regression in NLP and many other fields is widely used as an analytic tool for testing hypotheses about the effect of various explanatory variables (features). In text classification, perhaps we want to know if logically negative words (no, not, never) are more likely to be associated with negative sentiment, or if negative reviews of movies are more likely to discuss the cinematography. However, in doing so it's necessary to control for potential confounds: other factors that might influence sentiment (the movie genre, the year it was made, perhaps the length of the review in words). Or we might be studying the relationship between NLP-extracted linguistic features and non-linguistic outcomes (hospital readmissions, political outcomes, or product sales), but need to control for confounds (the age of the patient, the county of voting, the brand of the product). In such cases, logistic regression allows us to test whether some feature is associated with some outcome above and beyond the effect of other features.