|1. Title of Database: Abalone data
|
|2. Sources:
|
|   (a) Original owners of database:
|	Marine Resources Division
|	Marine Research Laboratories - Taroona
|	Department of Primary Industry and Fisheries, Tasmania
|	GPO Box 619F, Hobart, Tasmania 7001, Australia
|	(contact: Warwick Nash +61 02 277277, wnash@dpi.tas.gov.au)
|
|   (b) Donor of database:
|	Sam Waugh (Sam.Waugh@cs.utas.edu.au)
|	Department of Computer Science, University of Tasmania
|	GPO Box 252C, Hobart, Tasmania 7001, Australia
|
|   (c) Date received: December 1995
|
|
|3. Past Usage:
|
|   Sam Waugh (1995) "Extending and benchmarking Cascade-Correlation", PhD
|   thesis, Computer Science Department, University of Tasmania.
|
|   -- Test set performance (final 1044 examples, first 3133 used for training):
|	24.86% Cascade-Correlation (no hidden nodes)
|	26.25% Cascade-Correlation (5 hidden nodes)
|	21.5%  C4.5
|	 0.0%  Linear Discriminate Analysis
|	 3.57% k=5 Nearest Neighbour
|      (Problem encoded as a classification task)
|
|   -- Data set samples are highly overlapped.  Further information is required
|	to separate completely using affine combinations.  Other restrictions
|	to data set examined.
|
|   David Clark, Zoltan Schreter, Anthony Adams "A Quantitative Comparison of
|   Dystal and Backpropagation", submitted to the Australian Conference on
|   Neural Networks (ACNN'96). Data set treated as a 3-category classification
|   problem (grouping ring classes 1-8, 9 and 10, and 11 on).
|
|   -- Test set performance (3133 training, 1044 testing as above):
|	64%    Backprop
|	55%    Dystal
|   -- Previous work (Waugh, 1995) on same data set:
|	61.40% Cascade-Correlation (no hidden nodes)
|	65.61% Cascade-Correlation (5 hidden nodes)
|	59.2%  C4.5
|	32.57% Linear Discriminate Analysis
|	62.46% k=5 Nearest Neighbour
|
|
|4. Relevant Information Paragraph:
|
|   Predicting the age of abalone from physical measurements.  The age of
|   abalone is determined by cutting the shell through the cone, staining it,
|   and counting the number of rings through a microscope -- a boring and
|   time-consuming task.  Other measurements, which are easier to obtain, are
|   used to predict the age.  Further information, such as weather patterns
|   and location (hence food availability) may be required to solve the problem.
|
|   From the original data examples with missing values were removed (the
|   majority having the predicted value missing), and the ranges of the
|   continuous values have been scaled for use with an ANN (by dividing by 200).
|
|   Data comes from an original (non-machine-learning) study:
|
|	Warwick J Nash, Tracy L Sellers, Simon R Talbot, Andrew J Cawthorn and
|	Wes B Ford (1994) "The Population Biology of Abalone (_Haliotis_
|	species) in Tasmania. I. Blacklip Abalone (_H. rubra_) from the North
|	Coast and Islands of Bass Strait", Sea Fisheries Division, Technical
|	Report No. 48 (ISSN 1034-3288)
|
|
|5. Number of Instances: 4177
|
|
|6. Number of Attributes: 8
|
|
|7. Attribute information:
|
|   Given is the attribute name, attribute type, the measurement unit and a
|   brief description.  The number of rings is the value to predict: either
|   as a continuous value or as a classification problem.
|
|	Name		Data Type	Meas.	Description
|	----		---------	-----	-----------
|	Sex		nominal			M, F, and I (infant)
|	Length		continuous	mm	Longest shell measurement
|	Diameter	continuous	mm	perpendicular to length
|	Height		continuous	mm	with meat in shell
|	Whole weight	continuous	grams	whole abalone
|	Shucked weight	continuous	grams	weight of meat
|	Viscera weight	continuous	grams	gut weight (after bleeding)
|	Shell weight	continuous	grams	after being dried
|	Rings		integer			+1.5 gives the age in years
|
|   Statistics for numeric domains:
|
|		Length	Diam	Height	Whole	Shucked	Viscera	Shell	Rings
|	Min	0.075	0.055	0.000	0.002	0.001	0.001	0.002	    1
|	Max	0.815	0.650	1.130	2.826	1.488	0.760	1.005	   29
|	Mean	0.524	0.408	0.140	0.829	0.359	0.181	0.239	9.934
|	SD	0.120	0.099	0.042	0.490	0.222	0.110	0.139	3.224
|	Correl	0.557	0.575	0.557	0.540	0.421	0.504	0.628	  1.0
|
|
|8. Missing Attribute Values: None
|
|
|9. Class Distribution:
|
|	Class	Examples
|	-----	--------
|	1	1
|	2	1
|	3	15
|	4	57
|	5	115
|	6	259
|	7	391
|	8	568
|	9	689
|	10	634
|	11	487
|	12	267
|	13	203
|	14	126
|	15	103
|	16	67
|	17	58
|	18	42
|	19	32
|	20	26
|	21	14
|	22	6
|	23	9
|	24	2
|	25	1
|	26	1
|	27	2
|	29	1
|	-----	----
|	Total	4177

Rings.

Sex:		M, F, I.
Length:		continuous. |	mm	Longest shell measurement
Diameter:	continuous. |	mm	perpendicular to length
Height:		continuous. |	mm	with meat in shell
Whole weight:	continuous. |	grams	whole abalone
Shucked weight:	continuous. |	grams	weight of meat
Viscera weight:	continuous. |	grams	gut weight (after bleeding)
Shell weight:	continuous. |	grams	after being dried

Rings: continuous.
