Boston Housing Data

We use the Boston data in the MASS package. This data was collected by urban planners to generate quantitative estimates of the cost-benefit for improving air quality. The response variable of interest ‘medv’ is the median value of owner-occupied homes. The Boston data.frame has dimensions 506, 14. The variables are described in Table 1.

Table 1. Variables in the Boston Dataset.
Variable.. …Description
1… crim per capita crime rate by town
2… zn proportion of residential land zoned for lots over 25,000 sq.ft
3… indus proportion of non-retail business acres per town
4… chas Charles River dummy variable (= 1 if tract bounds river; 0 otherwise)
5… nox nitrogen oxides concentration (parts per 10 million)
6… rm average number of rooms per dwelling
7… age proportion of owner-occupied units built prior to 1940
8… dis weighted mean of distances to five Boston employment centres
9… rad index of accessibility to radial highways
10… tax full-value property-tax rate per $10,000
11… ptratio pupil-teacher ratio by town
12… black 1000(Bk - 0.63)^2 where Bk is the proportion of blacks by town
13… lstat lower status of the population (percent)
14… medv median value of owner-occupied homes in $1000s