Getting ready

We will consider the Boston housing price dataset (http://lib.stat.cmu.edu/datasets/boston) collected by Harrison and Rubinfield in 1978. The dataset contains 506 sample cases. Each house is assigned 14 attributes:

• CRIM: per capita crime rate by town
• ZN: Proportion of residential land zoned for lots over 25,000 sq.ft
• INDUS: Proportion of non-retail business acres per town
• CHAS: Charles River dummy variable (1 if tract bounds river; 0 otherwise)
• NOX: Nitric oxide concentration (parts per 10 million)
• RM: Average number of rooms per dwelling
• AGE: Proportion of owner-occupied units built prior to 1940
• DIS: Weighted distances to five Boston employment centres
• RAD: Index of accessibility to radial highways
• TAX: Full-value property-tax rate per $10,000
• PTRATIO: Pupil-teacher ratio by town
• B: 1000(Bk - 0.63)^2 where Bk is the proportion of blacks by town
• LSTAT: percent lower status of the population
• MEDV: Median value of owner-occupied homes in $1,000's