Neighborhood Plants

The Problem

You are visiting a new city. As you drive around, your host observes that you can tell what kind of neighborhood you're in simply by looking at the planting around each yard. He says that while there are lots of individual differences, you can see some overall similarities.

You decide to evaluate the neighborhood plantings to see if your host's hypothesis of neighborhood characteristics is true or not. You wait until the weekly real estate viewings are available and get the newspaper listings of houses that are for sale. You choose three neighborhoods identified by your host and randomly select three houses from the listings.

At each home you determine if the following features are available.

  • Street trees
  • Lawn
  • Driveway border
  • Shrubs bordering the house
  • Entrance plants
  • Shade trees
  • Seasonal flower bed
  • Hanging flower basket
  • Potted plants
  • Vegetable garden
  • Fruit trees
  • Property line trees
  • Property fence plants
  • Hedge
  • Water feature with plants
  • Arbor

Do the similarities in the data correspond to your original classification of neighborhoods?

Please Note: These are made-up data and do not represent any real situation.

The Data

  • The data were collected for three neighborhoods. These are represented by the codes N1, N2 and N3. Each randomly selected house in a neighborhood is designated with a letter (a to c).
  • The presence of a feature is marked as a 1, the absence with a 0.

Feature N1a N1b N1c N2a N2b N2c N3a N3b N3c

hanging-flower-basket 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0

seasonal-flower-bed 0 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 0

water-feature-with-plants 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 0

shade-trees 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 0

arbor 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 0

shrubs-bordering-house 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 0 1

fruit-trees 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 0

street-trees 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0

vegetable-garden 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1

lawn 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0

driveway-border 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 0

entrance-plants 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 0

property-fence-plants 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0

property-line-trees 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0

hedge 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1

potted-plants 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0