House price and floor area

One house had an extremely high floor area — it stands out as an outlier in the marginal distribution of floor area. From the relationship between floor area and price of the other houses, we would also have expected this house's sale price to have been higher, so it is also an outlier because the house does not follow the pattern that is evident in the rest of the data.

Ideally, we would try to find out what was special about the house. Was it mis-classified as a house when it was really a commercial property or block of apartments?

The general version of this page contains an example with an outlier that is not unusual in either of its marginal distributions.

The scatterplot shows information obtained from a sample of 141 real estate sales records from two suburbs of Palmerston North for houses built in the last thirty years.