Using Machine Learning Models and Actual Transaction Data for Predicting Real Estate Prices

Abstract

Real estate price prediction is crucial for the establishment of real estate policies and can help real estate owners and agents make informative decisions. The aim of this study is to employ actual transaction data and machine learning models to predict prices of real estate. The actual transaction data contain attributes and transaction prices of real estate that respectively serve as independent variables and dependent variables for machine learning models. The study employed four machine learning models-namely, least squares support vector regression (LSSVR), classification and regression tree (CART), general regression neural networks (GRNN), and backpropagation neural networks (BPNN), to forecast real estate prices. In addition, genetic algorithms were used to select parameters of machine learning models. Numerical results indicated that the least squares support vector regression outperforms the other three machine learning models in terms of forecasting accuracy. Furthermore, forecasting results generated by the least squares support vector regression are superior to previous related studies of real estate price prediction in terms of the average absolute percentage error. Thus, the machine learning-based model is a substantial and feasible way to forecast real estate prices, and the least squares support vector regression can provide relatively competitive and satisfactory results.