LASSO is a technique that combines linear regression with L1 regularization to automatically select relevant features and produce sparse models.
The optimization function of LASSO minimizes the sum of squared residuals while constraining the sum of absolute weights, forcing many coefficients to zero.
L1 regularization in LASSO creates a constraint region in parameter space, essential for feature selection by forcing some coefficients to exactly zero.
LASSO is useful for feature importance analysis, robust to multicollinearity, and can be visualized through the regularization path of coefficients.