Context Abalone is common name for any group of small to very large sea snails, commonly found along the coasts across the world, and used as delicacy in cusinies and it's leftover shell is fashioned into jewelery due to it's iridescent luster. Due to it's demand and economic value it's often harvested in farms, and as such the need to predict the age of abalone from physical measurements. Traditional approach to determine it's age is by cutting the shell through the cone, staining it, and counting the number of rings through a microscope -- a boring and time-consuming task. Data Description * 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). * **Number of instances:** `4177` * **Number of attributes:** `8` * **Features:** Sex, Length, Diameter, Height, Whole weight, Shucked weight, Viscera weight, and Shell weight * **Target:** Rings > Note: Number of rings is the value to predict: either as a continuous value or it can be converted to classification problem. * **Attribute Information:** *Given below is attribute name, type, measurement, and brief description.* 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 * **Missing Values:** `None` Discover * Predict age of abalone using either: - Regression - Classification Dataset source Dataset comes from UCI Machine Learning repository: [https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/Abalone][1] [1]: https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/Abalone