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.
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()
: