Predictability of Belgian residential real estate rents using tree-based ML models and IML techniques

Purpose The purpose is twofold. First, this study aims to establish that black box tree-based machine learning (ML) models have better predictive performance than a standard linear regression (LR) hedonic model for rent prediction. Second, it shows the added value of analyzing tree-based ML models with interpretable machine learning (IML) techniques. Design/methodology/approach Data on Belgian residential rental properties were collected. Tree-based ML models, random forest regression and eXtreme gradient boosting regression were applied to derive rent prediction models to compare predictive p... Mehr ...