Exploiting geographic dependencies for real estate appraisal: a mutual perspective of ranking and clustering

It is traditionally a challenge for home buyers to understand, compare and contrast the investment values of real estates. While a number of estate appraisal methods have been developed to value real property, the performances of these methods have been limited by the traditional data sources for estate appraisal. However, with the development of new ways of collecting estate-related mobile data, there is a potential to leverage geographic dependencies of estates for enhancing estate appraisal. Indeed, the geographic dependencies of the value of an estate can be from the characteristics of its own neighborhood (individual), the values of its nearby estates (peer), and the prosperity of the affiliated latent business area (zone). To this end, in this paper, we propose a geographic method, named ClusRanking, for estate appraisal by leveraging the mutual enforcement of ranking and clustering power. ClusRanking is able to exploit geographic individual, peer, and zone dependencies in a probabilistic ranking model. Specifically, we first extract the geographic utility of estates from geography data, estimate the neighborhood popularity of estates by mining taxicab trajectory data, and model the influence of latent business areas via ClusRanking. Also, we use a linear model to fuse these three influential factors and predict estate investment values. Moreover, we simultaneously consider individual, peer and zone dependencies, and derive an estate-specific ranking likelihood as the objective function. Finally, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation with real-world estate related data, and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.