Statistics Dummy Variable as Dependent Variable Regression

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I have a bunch of independent variables: height, weight, etc that I want to regress a dummy variable on to. For instance, if I wanted to regress diabetes (0 if patient doesnt have diabetes, 1 if patient does have diabetes) and I wanted to figure out the effect of an increase in 1 pound of weight on the probability of having diabetes, how would I do that? I'm sure there are multiple ways of doing it but I just never have heard of a model that does this. I thought it was the probit model but I'm not sure. Any thoughts?

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Robert Dodier On

The problem you are describing is known as logistic regression; a web search for that should turn up a lot of hits. Most commonly, the response is some function of a linear combination of inputs, but more generally, the response could be a nonlinear function of inputs.

The dependence of the response on an input (e.g. weight) is interesting, but not exactly well-posed, since the change of the probability of the response varies over the range of the input variable; the change is very small for very large or very small values of the input, and reaches some maximum in between.