Exploring the Housing Dataset
Before we implement our first linear regression model, we will introduce a new dataset, the Housing Dataset, which contains information about houses in the suburbs of Boston collected by D. Harrison and D.L. Rubinfeld in 1978. The Housing Dataset has been made freely available and can be downloaded from the UCI machine learning repository at https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/Housing.
The features of the 506 samples may be summarized as shown in the excerpt of the dataset description:
CRIM: This is the per capita crime rate by town
ZN: This is the proportion of residential land zoned for lots larger than 25,000 sq.ft.
INDUS: This is the proportion of non-retail business acres per town
CHAS: This is the Charles River dummy variable (this is equal to 1 if tract bounds river; 0 otherwise)
NOX: This is the nitric oxides concentration (parts per 10 million)
RM: This is the average number of rooms per dwelling
AGE: This is the proportion of owner-occupied units...
