Replace references to deprecated Boston housing prices dataset with another dataset

[skylerwharton]

As noted in sklearn's documenation, the Boston housing dataset is being deprecated due to a significant ethical concern:

Warning: 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.

Could uses of this dataset within the shap documentation (for example, on the "An introduction to explainable AI with Shapley values" page) be replaced with uses of another dataset? For example, sklearn suggests that either the California housing dataset or the Ames housing dataset are reasonable alternative datasets [source].

Thank you!

[shanewalsh1123]

I can have a look at this.

[znacer]

To help deal with this issue, i listed files where "shap.datasets.boston" occurs :

• notebooks:
  • notebooks/tabular_examples/model_agnostic/Simple Boston Demo.ipynb
  • notebooks/tabular_examples/tree_based_models/tree_shap_paper/Tree SHAP in Python.ipynb
  • notebooks/tabular_examples/tree_based_models/Catboost tutorial.ipynb
  • notebooks/tabular_examples/tree_based_models/Example of loading a custom tree model into SHAP.ipynb
  • notebooks/tabular_examples/tree_based_models/Python Version of Tree SHAP.ipynb
  • notebooks/tabular_examples/tree_based_models/Force Plot Colors.ipynb
  • notebooks/tabular_examples/tree_based_models/Front page example (XGBoost).ipynb
  • notebooks/benchmarks/tabular/Tabular Prediction Benchmark Demo.ipynb
  • notebooks/benchmarks/tabular/Benchmark XGBoost explanations.ipynb
• documentation :
  • generated/shap.datasets.boston.rst
  • api.rst

[connortann]

I believe this is now closed 👌

Let us know if there's anything we've missed!