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Estimation of missing prices in real-estate market agent-based simulations with machine learning and dimensionality reduction methods

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Abstract

The opacity of real-estate market involves some challenges in their agent-based simulation. While some real-estate Web sites provide the prices of a great amount of houses publicly, the prices of the rest are not available. The estimation of these prices is necessary for simulating their evolution from a complete initial set of houses. Additionally, this estimation could also be useful for other purposes such as appraising houses, letting buyers know which are the best offered prices (i.e., the lowest ones compared to the appraisals) and recommending the buyers to set an initial price. This work proposes combining dimensionality reduction methods with machine learning techniques to obtain the estimated prices. In particular, this work analyzes the use of nonnegative factorization, recursive feature elimination and feature selection with a variance threshold, as dimensionality reduction methods. It compares the application of linear regression, support vector regression, the k-nearest neighbors and a multilayer perceptron neural network, as machine learning techniques. This work has applied a tenfold cross-validation for comparing the estimations and errors and assessing the improvement over a basic estimator commonly used in the beginning of simulations. The developed software and the used dataset are freely available from a data research repository for the sake of reproducibility and the support to other researchers.

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Notes

  1. https://www.idealista.com (last accessed October 22, 2018).

  2. http://data.gov.uk/ (last accessed September 16, 2017).

  3. https://www.fotocasa.es/es/ (last accessed October 22, 2018).

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Acknowledgements

This work has been supported by the program “Estancias de movilidad en el extranjero José Castillejo para jóvenes doctores” funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport with reference CAS17/00005. This work also acknowledges the research project “Diseño de actividades de aprendizaje colaborativas con Big Data” with reference PIIDUZ_16_120 funded by University of Zaragoza. We acknowledge the research project “Construcción de un framework para agilizar el desarrollo de aplicaciones móviles en el ámbito de la salud” funded by University of Zaragoza and Foundation Ibercaja with grant reference JIUZ-2017-TEC-03. We also acknowledge support from “Universidad de Zaragoza,” “Fundación Bancaria Ibercaja” and “Fundación CAI” in the “Programa Ibercaja-CAI de Estancias de Investigación” with reference IT1/18. This work was partially supported by the Spanish Research grant MTM2015-65433-P (MINECO/FEDER), Gobierno de Aragón and Fondo Social Europeo. Furthermore, we acknowledge the “Fondo Social Europeo” and the “Departamento de Tecnología y Universidad del Gobierno de Aragón” for their joint support with grant number Ref-T81.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering of Systems, EduQTech, University of Zaragoza, Escuela Universitaria Politécnica de Teruel, c/Atarazana 2, 44003, Teruel, Spain

    Iván García-Magariño

  2. Instituto de Investigación Sanitaria Aragón, University of Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain

    Iván García-Magariño & Carlos Medrano

  3. Department of Electronics Engineering and Communications, EduQTech, University of Zaragoza, Escuela Universitaria Politécnica de Teruel, c/Atarazana 2, 44003, Teruel, Spain

    Carlos Medrano

  4. Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Zaragoza, Escuela Universitaria Politécnica de Teruel, c/Atarazana 2, 44003, Teruel, Spain

    Jorge Delgado

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  1. Iván García-Magariño
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Correspondence to Iván García-Magariño.

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García-Magariño, I., Medrano, C. & Delgado, J. Estimation of missing prices in real-estate market agent-based simulations with machine learning and dimensionality reduction methods. Neural Comput & Applic 32, 2665–2682 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-018-3938-7

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