Deep learning model for house price prediction using heterogeneous data analysis along with joint self-attention mechanism

Abstract

House price prediction is a popular topic, and research teams are increasingly performing related studies by using deep learning or machine learning models. However, because some studies have not considered comprehensive information that affects house prices, prediction results are not always sufficiently precise. Therefore, we propose an end to end joint self-attention model for house prediction. In this model, we import data on public facilities such as parks, schools, and mass rapid transit stations to represent the availability of amenities, and we use satellite maps to analyze the environment surrounding houses. We adopt attention mechanisms, which are widely used in image, speech, and translation tasks, to identify crucial features that are considered by prospective house buyers. The model can automatically assign weights when given transaction data. Our proposed model differs from self-attention models because it considers the interaction between two different features to learn the complicated relationship between features in order to increase prediction precision. We conduct experiments to demonstrate the performance of the model. Experimental data include actual selling prices in real estate transaction data for the period from 2017 to 2018, public facility data acquired from the Taipei and New Taipei governments, and satellite maps crawled using the Google Maps application programming interface. We utilize these datasets to train our proposed and compare its performance with that of other machine learning-based models such as Extreme Gradient Boosting and Light Gradient Boosted Machine, deep learning, and several attention models. The experimental results indicate that the proposed model achieves a low prediction error and outperforms the other models. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first research to incorporate attention mechanism and STN network to conduct house price prediction.