What is the best machine learning model to predict a continuous variable where the predictors include categorical, numerical variables and a text?
I believe this is what you want to know, the approach to handle your text data. You can do one hot encoding for your categorical data if they are not ordinal or label encoding for ordinal. As for model, I am also a newbie but I think you can't define a rule of thumb that this model is best for regression. It depends on the data, which model will work.