Predicting House Prices on the Countryside using Boosted Decision Trees

Abstract: This thesis intends to evaluate the feasibility of supervised learning models for predicting house prices on the countryside of South Sweden. It is essential for mortgage lenders to have accurate housing valuation algorithms and the current model offered by Booli is not accurate enough when evaluating residence prices on the countryside. Different types of boosted decision trees were implemented to address this issue and their performances were compared to traditional machine learning methods. These different types of supervised learning models were implemented in order to find the best model with regards to relevant evaluation metrics such as root-mean-squared error (RMSE) and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE). The implemented models were ridge regression, lasso regression, random forest, AdaBoost, gradient boosting, CatBoost, XGBoost, and LightGBM. All these models were benchmarked against Booli's current housing valuation algorithms which are based on a k-NN model. The results from this thesis indicated that the LightGBM model is the optimal one as it had the best overall performance with respect to the chosen evaluation metrics. When comparing the LightGBM model to the benchmark, the performance was overall better, the LightGBM model had an RMSE score of 0.330 compared to 0.358 for the Booli model, indicating that there is a potential of using boosted decision trees to improve the predictive accuracy of residence prices on the countryside.