STACKING-BASED UNCERTAINTY MODELLING OF STATISTICAL AND MACHINE LEARNING METHODS FOR RESIDENTIAL PROPERTY VALUATION

Abstract

Estimating real estate prices helps to adapt informed policies to regulate the real estate market and assist sellers and buyers to have a fair business. This study aims to estimate the price of residential properties in District 5 of Tehran, Capital of Iran, and model its associated uncertainty. The study implements the Stacking technique to model uncertainties by integrating the outputs of basic models. Basic models must have a good performance for their combinations to have acceptable results. This study employs four statistical and machine learning models as basic models: Random Forest (RF), Ordinary Least Squares (OLS), Weighted K-Nearest Neighbour (WKNN), and Support Vector Regression (SVR) to estimate the price of residential properties. The results show that the integrated output is more accurate for the quadruple combination mode than for any of the binary and triple combinations of the basic models. Comparing the Stacking technique with the Voting technique, it is shown that the Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) reduces from 10.18% to 9.81%. Hence we conclude that our method performs better than the Voting technique.