Midterm Practice: Predicting Boston Home Values

In this lab, we are predicting the natural log of the sum of all transactions per user.
This is a great chance to practice all of our skills to date in order to create a regression model. Start by importing the data and analyzing it briefly. Then, start fitting a model and performing successive iterations to tune and refine your model.

All data is stored in a csv file, 'train.csv' in the Data folder.

Variable Descriptions

This data frame contains the following columns:

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

nitrogen oxides concentration (parts per 10 million).

rm

average number of rooms per dwelling.

age

proportion of owner-occupied units built prior to 1940.

dis

weighted mean of 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.

black

1000(Bk - 0.63)^2 where Bk is the proportion of blacks by town.

lstat

lower status of the population (percent).

medv

median value of owner-occupied homes in $10000s.

Source Harrison, D. and Rubinfeld, D.L. (1978) Hedonic prices and the demand for clean air. J. Environ. Economics and Management 5, 81–102.

Belsley D.A., Kuh, E. and Welsch, R.E. (1980) Regression Diagnostics. Identifying Influential Data and Sources of Collinearity. New York: Wiley.

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