boston_housing

boston_housing, a dataset which stores training and test data about housing prices in Boston. This dataset is also available as a builtin dataset in keras.

The dataset is described as Housing Values in Suburbs of Boston. The fields are

1. crim, per capita crime rate by town.
2. zn, proportion of residential land zoned for lots over 25,000 sq.ft.
3. indus, proportion of non-retail business acres per town.
4. chas, Charles River dummy variable (= 1 if tract bounds river; 0 otherwise).
5. nox, nitrogen oxides concentration (parts per 10 million).
6. rm, average number of rooms per dwelling.
7. age, proportion of owner-occupied units built prior to 1940.
8. dis, weighted mean of distances to five Boston employment centres.
9. rad, index of accessibility to radial highways.
10. tax, full-value property-tax rate per $10,000.
11. ptratio, pupil-teacher ratio by town.
12. black, 1000(Bk - 0.63)^2 where Bk is the proportion of blacks by town.
13. lstat, lower status of the population (percent).
14. medv, median value of owner-occupied homes in $1000s.

Licensing:

The computer code and data files made available on this web page are distributed under the GNU LGPL license.

Related Programs:

boston_housing, a keras script which sets up a neural network to apply regression to predict housing prices, based on the Boston housing dataset.

boston_housing_external, a keras script which reads the Boston housing dataset from an external file, rather than referencing the built-in keras dataset.

Reference:

• D A Belsley, E Kuh, R E Welsch,
  Regression Diagnostics: Identifying Influential Data and Sources of Collinearity,
  New York, Wiley, 1980.
• D Harrison, D L Rubinfeld,
  Hedonic prices and the demand for clean air,
  J. Environ. Economics and Management,
  Volume 5, pages 81–102, 1978.

Source Code:

The CSV data files include a header line. The test CSV file does NOT include the actual selling price.

• boston_housing_test.csv, 173 records, each of 14 fields;
• boston_housing_train.csv, 333 records, each of 15 fields;

The TXT data file has no header line. It includes an additional initial index field on each line.

• boston_housing.txt, 506 records, each of 16 fields;
• boston_housing_test_index.txt, the indices of 173 test records.
• boston_housing_train_index.txt, the indices of 333 training records.