An Intelligent Homogeneous Model Based on an Enhanced Weighted Kernel Self-Organizing Map for Forecasting House Prices

Abstract

Accurately forecasting housing prices will enable investors to attain profits, and it can provide information to stakeholders that housing prices in the community are falling, stabilizing, or rising. Previous studies on housing price forecasting mostly used hedonic pricing and weighted regression methods, which led to the lack of consideration of the nonlinear relationship model and its explanatory power. Furthermore, the attribute data of housing price forecasts are a heterogeneous study, and they are difficult to forecast accurately. Therefore, this study proposes an intelligent homogeneous model based on an enhanced weighted kernel self-organizing map (EW-KSOM) for forecasting house prices; that is, this study proposes an EW-KSOM algorithm to cluster the collected data and then applies random forest, extra tree, multilayer perception, and support vector regression to forecast the house prices of full, district, and apartment complex data. In the experimental comparison, we compare the performance of the proposed enhanced weighted kernel self-organizing map with the listing clustering methods. The results show that the best forecast algorithm is the combined EW-KSOM and random forest under the root mean square error and root-relative square error, and the proposed method can effectively improve the forecast capability of housing prices and understand the influencing factors of housing prices in full and important districts. Furthermore, we obtain that the top five key factors influencing house prices are transferred land area, house age, building transfer total area, population percentage, and the total number of floors. Lastly, the research results can provide references for investors and related organizations.