What's a Typical Home Worth in This California Neighbourhood?
From income, housing age, rooms, population and location, what is the median house value in this block group? It's the 1990 census table that most data scientists meet first.
The table
20,640 California census block groups with median income, housing age, rooms, bedrooms, population, households and coordinates, and the median house value. It's in Welt's research catalogue as Houses, 20,640 rows by 9 columns, licensed MIT (PMLB collection). The catalogue measures its signal at 0.78. At 20,640 rows and 8 features the table is larger than the model limits allow, so the walkthrough evaluates and fits on a seeded sample of 8,000 rows. TabICLv2 and Kumo Tabular Medium compete.
Walkthrough
Load it from the catalogue
Find the table, read its recorded target and print the column names.
import pandas as pd from welt import Client with Client() as client: item = client.research_datasets(q="houses California median value", limit=1)["items"][0] info = client.research_dataset(item["id"]) data = client.load_research_dataset(item["id"]) target = info["targets"][0] target = target["name"] if isinstance(target, dict) else target print([column["name"] for column in info["schema"]], target)Pick the rows
Set aside 20 rows to predict at the end. The models learn from a seeded sample of 8,000 of the rest, the most this table's width allows.
known = data.dropna(subset=[target]) new_rows = known.sample(20, random_state=1) table = known.drop(new_rows.index).sample(8000, random_state=7)Compare the models and predict
The models compete on the same folds against a simple guess, then the top-ranked one is fitted on the whole table. RMSE and MAE are average errors in the target's own units, so lower is better. The last table puts each prediction next to the real answer.
with Client() as client: evaluation = client.evaluate(table, target, task="regression", seed=7, models=["tabicl-v2", "kumo-medium"]) model = evaluation.fit() print(evaluation.summary()[["name", "rank", "rmse_mean", "mae_mean"]]) features = new_rows.drop(columns=target) print(pd.DataFrame({"actual": new_rows[target].values, "predicted": model.predict(features)}))
What you get
Try it
Use Open with to run the research datasets notebook in Colab, Kaggle or Jupyter and search for "houses California median value", or run the code above after pip install "welt-client[parquet]".
Open with
- Type
- Use case
- Area
- Finance
- Question
- What's a Typical Home Worth in This California Neighbourhood?
- Model
- TabICLv2, Kumo Tabular Medium
- Data
- Houses, 20,640 rows
- For
- Housing analysts, planners and students
- Licence
- MIT (PMLB collection)