Predicting Housing Transaction with Common Covariance GNNs

Predicting Housing Transaction with Common Covariance GNNs

Jinjin Li, Bin Liu, Chengyan Liu, Hongli Zhang

Proceedings of the Thirty-Third International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
AI for Good. Pages 7323-7330. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2024/810

Urban migration is a significant aspect of a city's economy. The exploration of the underlying determinants of housing purchases among current residents contributes to the study of future trends in urban migration, enabling governments to formulate appropriate policies to guide future economic growth. This article employs a factor model to analyze data on residents' rentals, first-time home purchases, and subsequent housing upgrades. We decompose the factors influencing housing purchases into common drivers and specific drivers. Our hypothesis is that common drivers reflect universal social patterns, while personalized drivers represent stochastic elements. We construct a correlation matrix capturing the inter-resident relationships based on the common drivers of housing purchases. We then propose a graph neural network based on the correlation matrix to model housing predictions as a node classification problem. Our model addresses two critical questions. Firstly, we aim to identify which part of rental residents will engage in first-time home purchases in the future. Secondly, we seek to determine which group of residents, having completed rental and first-time home purchases, will opt for a second home purchase. The results of our testing on real-world datasets demonstrate that based solely on rental and home purchase records, we can achieve a sensitivity for housing predictions exceeding 80%.
Keywords:
Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: General
Machine Learning: General