B.4 Boston Housing

The data in bostonh.dat were collected by Harrison and Rubinfeld (1978). They comprise 506 observations for each census district of the Boston metropolitan area. The data set was analyzed in Belsley, Kuh and Welsch (1988, pp. 244-261) which introduced a number of transformations.

Column Variable Type Description
1 CRIM metric per capita crime rate by town
2 ZN metric proportion of residential land zoned for lots over 25,000 sq.ft.
3 INDUS metric proportion of nonretail business acres per town
4 CHAS binary Charles River dummy variable (= 1 if tract bounds river, 0 otherwise)
5 NOXSQ metric nitric oxides concentration (parts per 10 million)
6 RM metric average number of rooms per dwelling
7 AGE metric proportion of owner-occupied units built prior to 1940
8 DIS metric weighted distances to five Boston employment centers
9 RAD metric index of accessibility to radial highways
10 TAX metric full-value property tax rate per $10,000
11 PTRATIO metric pupil-teacher ratio by town
12 B metric 1000(Bk - 0.63)$ ^2$ where Bk is the proportion of blacks by town
13 LSTAT metric % lower status of the population
14 MEDV metric median value of owner-occupied homes in $1000's