I very much like your paragraph, Olivier. I might recommend additionally raising it as a warning when calling the data creation function.
For reference, in scikit-image when we removed Lena we raised a warning and returned an alternative (the now-famous `data.astronaut()`) for two versions, before removing the image altogether. I think that was a good approach for us, but I like your preference of using the dataset as an educational opportunity in this case. I lean in that direction also, but with the caveat that I think the message should be included in a warning, not just in the docstring. Juan. > On 13 Oct 2020, at 8:59 pm, Olivier Grisel <olivier.gri...@ensta.org> wrote: > > Hi all, > > Thanks to the sustained effort of several contributors (thanks Maria > and Lucy in particular), the Boston housing price dataset is no longer > used in the examples of scikit-learn (nor in the test suite) in the > master branch. > > To give some context on why this dataset is problematic, please have a > look at this discussion and the blog post linked in it: > > https://github.com/scikit-learn/scikit-learn/issues/16155 > > Now that we no longer use sklearn.datasets.load_boston internally, we > have to make a decision about what to do with the loader function > itself: deprecate it? just silently hide it from our documentation > from our documentation (probably a bad idea)? keep it but educate our > users about its ethical problem? > > Personally, I would be slightly in favor of the latter option and I > drafted a short paragraph here: > > https://github.com/scikit-learn/scikit-learn/pull/18594#issuecomment-707601448 > > Please feel free to share your thoughts so that we can hopefully make > a consensual decision before the 0.24 release. > > Regards, > > -- > Olivier > _______________________________________________ > scikit-learn mailing list > scikit-learn@python.org > https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/scikit-learn _______________________________________________ scikit-learn mailing list scikit-learn@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/scikit-learn
