Sources
Past Usage.
Relevant Information.
Attribute Information.
Summary Statistics.

Sources:

• Creator: R.A. Fisher
• Donor: Michael Marshall (MARSHALL%PLU@io.arc.nasa.gov)
• Date: July, 1988
• Where: my course server at "global.bus.iastate.edu" under directory "m528\data\iris".

Past Usage:

Publications: too many to mention!!! Here are a few.

1. Fisher, R.A. "The Use of Multiple Measurements in Taxonomic Problems" Annual Eugenics, 7, Part II, 179-188 (1936); also in Contributions to Mathematical Statistics (John Wiley, NY, 1950).
2. Duda, R.O., & Hart, P.E. (1973) Pattern Classification and Scene Analysis. John Wiley & Sons. P. 218.
3. Dasarathy, B.V. (1980) "Nosing Around the Neighborhood: A New System Structure and Classification Rule for Recognition in Partially Exposed Environments," IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Vol. PAMI-2, No. 1, 67-71. Results: very low misclassification rates (0% for the setosa class)
4. Gates, G.W. (1972) "The Reduced Nearest Neighbor Rule," IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, May 1972, 431-433. Results: very low misclassification rates again
5. See also: 1988 MLC Proceedings, 54-64. Cheeseman et al's AUTOCLASS II conceptual clustering system finds 3 classes in the data.

Relevant Information:

• This is perhaps the best known database to be found in the pattern recognition literature. Fisher's paper is a classic in the field and is referenced frequently to this day. (See Duda & Hart, for example.) The data set contains 3 classes of 50 instances each, where each class refers to a type of iris plant. One class is linearly separable from the other 2; the latter are NOT linearly separable from each other.
• Predicted attribute: class of iris plant.
• This is an exceedingly simple domain.
• Number of Instances: 150 (50 in each of three classes)

• Number of Attributes: 4 numeric, predictive attributes and the class

Attribute Information:

• sepal length in cm
• sepal width in cm
• petal length in cm
• petal width in cm
• class: Iris Setosa, Iris Versicolour, and Iris Virginica.
• Missing attribute values: None

Summary Statistics:

	Min	Max	Mean	SD	Class Correlation
sepal length	4.3	7.9	5.84	0.83	0.7826
sepal width	2.0	4.4	3.05	0.43	-0.4194
petal length	1.0	6.9	3.76	1.76	0.9490 (high!)
petal width	0.1	2.5	1.20	0.76	0.9565 (high!)

Class Distribution: 33.3% for each of 3 classes.