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Replace boston dataset in tests and examples

Open desilinguist opened this issue 4 years ago • 0 comments

Looks like scikit-learn is planning to remove the boston housing dataset in v1.2 because it has ethical issues. They recommend using the calfornia housing dataset instead. We should do this before the dataset goes away.

Here’s the message you get when using load_boston():

/Users/nmadnani/anaconda/envs/sklldev/lib/python3.9/site-packages/sklearn/utils/deprecation.py:87: FutureWarning: Function load_boston is deprecated; `load_boston` is deprecated in 1.0 and will be removed in 1.2.

    The Boston housing prices dataset has an ethical problem. You can refer to
    the documentation of this function for further details.

    The scikit-learn maintainers therefore strongly discourage the use of this
    dataset unless the purpose of the code is to study and educate about
    ethical issues in data science and machine learning.

    In this special case, you can fetch the dataset from the original
    source::

        import pandas as pd
        import numpy as np


        data_url = "http://lib.stat.cmu.edu/datasets/boston"
        raw_df = pd.read_csv(data_url, sep="\s+", skiprows=22, header=None)
        data = np.hstack([raw_df.values[::2, :], raw_df.values[1::2, :2]])
        target = raw_df.values[1::2, 2]

    Alternative datasets include the California housing dataset (i.e.
    :func:`~sklearn.datasets.fetch_california_housing`) and the Ames housing
    dataset. You can load the datasets as follows::

        from sklearn.datasets import fetch_california_housing
        housing = fetch_california_housing()

    for the California housing dataset and::

        from sklearn.datasets import fetch_openml
        housing = fetch_openml(name="house_prices", as_frame=True)

    for the Ames housing dataset.

desilinguist avatar Nov 30 '21 02:11 desilinguist