[Bug]: load_boston dataset

What happened?

load_boston dataset is used in testing, but is now deprecated in sklearn>=1.2

this is causing import errors.

Environment

sklearn>=1.2

Minimum reproducible code

from tubular.dates import ToDatetimeTransformer

Relevant error output

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.

Code of Conduct

[X] I agree to follow this project's Code of Conduct

lvgig / tubular