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)![]() |
13 | LSTAT | metric | % lower status of the population |
14 | MEDV | metric | median value of owner-occupied homes in $1000's |