1. Title: Boston Housing Data

2. Sources:
   (a) Origin:  This dataset was taken from the StatLib library which is
                maintained at Carnegie Mellon University.
   (b) Creator:  Harrison, D. and Rubinfeld, D.L. 'Hedonic prices and the 
                 demand for clean air', J. Environ. Economics & Management,
                 vol.5, 81-102, 1978.
   (c) Date: July 7, 1993

3. Past Usage:
   -   Used in Belsley, Kuh & Welsch, 'Regression diagnostics ...', Wiley, 
       1980.   N.B. Various transformations are used in the table on
       pages 244-261.
    -  Quinlan,R. (1993). Combining Instance-Based and Model-Based Learning.
       In Proceedings on the Tenth International Conference of Machine 
       Learning, 236-243, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Morgan
       Kaufmann.

4. Relevant Information:

   Concerns housing values in suburbs of Boston.

5. Number of Instances: 506

6. Number of Attributes: 13 continuous attributes (including "class"
                         attribute "MEDV"), 1 binary-valued attribute.

7. Attribute Information:

    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       nitric 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 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. B        1000(Bk - 0.63)^2 where Bk is the proportion of blacks 
                 by town
    13. LSTAT    % lower status of the population
    14. MEDV     Median value of owner-occupied homes in $1000's

8. Missing Attribute Values:  None.



