scikit-learn has removed Boston data set

[jtniehof]

The Boston house pricing data set was removed from scikit-learn. Trying to import load_boston as in the chapter 2 examples notes it was removed in 1.2, citing this article on problems with the data set. This is not noted in the scikit-learn changelog as far as I can tell. (ETA: Its deprecation in 1.0, September 2021, was noted in that changelog).

Unfortunately the California dataset doesn't work as a direct drop-in, having 7 features instead of 13. The Ames dataset has 80(!) features, which is a lot more interesting than I usually give Ames credit for.

I'm not sure of the best path forward, but probably the most expedient is to implement the workaround for pulling the Boston data from the source and patch the feature names back in, as annoying as it is to continue use of it. Otherwise adapting to California is probably workable (but diverges from the text.)

[djkramnik]

An alternative is just to install an older version of scikit learn that still has the dataset

[sajidsarker]

I have been able to make the following work:

import pandas as pd
boston = pd.read_csv("http://lib.stat.cmu.edu/datasets/boston", sep="\s+", skiprows=22, header=None)
data = np.hstack([boston.values[::2, :], boston.values[1::2, :2]])
target = boston.values[1::2, 2]

[xchray]

MNIST should work as well