I always thought linear regression was a “foundation” of this field, but there is no discussion of a technique by this name in this book. Is there another name it goes by?
Logistic regression is also referred to as a "supervised classification" problem, which this book only addresses in the specialized space of document clustering or image classification. They do also address Support Vector Machines, which is a generalized algorithm for classification. However, there are a wide variety of specific implementations of logistic regressions that require quite a bit more conversation (dummy variables, log-odds ratios, ordinal variables) that are more directly applicable to a general stats background to machine learning itself.
Considering that the authors are all CS professors or researchers and not statisticians, that makes sense to me why they don't view logistic regression as foundational.
No,it's just linear regression. You'll find it discussed in a stats textbook since its relatively old (and as the joke goes, data science is what a statistician calls themselves when they want a pay rise).
That being said, IMO it's one of the most over-applied techniques around, and it gives many non-technical and technical users the illusion that they understand what's going on in the model...
