issue in accessing mglearn package

[Harsha-U]

ImportError: load_boston has been removed from scikit-learn since version 1.2.

The Boston housing prices dataset has an ethical problem: as investigated in [1], the authors of this dataset engineered a non-invertible variable "B" assuming that racial self-segregation had a positive impact on house prices [2]. Furthermore the goal of the research that led to the creation of this dataset was to study the impact of air quality but it did not give adequate demonstration of the validity of this assumption.

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 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.

[1] M Carlisle. "Racist data destruction?" https://medium.com/@docintangible/racist-data-destruction-113e3eff54a8

[2] Harrison Jr, David, and Daniel L. Rubinfeld. "Hedonic housing prices and the demand for clean air." Journal of environmental economics and management 5.1 (1978): 81-102. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/4974606_Hedonic_housing_prices_and_the_demand_for_clean_air

[amueller]

Indeed, all the examples need to be rewritten with a different dataset. Ideally with Ames, but that requires changing the flow of the book quite a bit. I'm not sure if there's a reasonable way to address this without a new edition.

[amueller]

I tried to do the workaround for now and published it to pypi. Can you please try again?