Citation:

Arun Raveendran Nair, 2025. "Improve Zillow’s Home Value Prediction Estimator (Zestimate)", ESP Journal of Engineering & Technology Advancements  5(2): 189-206.

Abstract:

The capstone project is based on the Kaggle competition developed by Zillow Inc., the online real estate database company. To provide better values to its customers, Zillow provides an estimate of the home sale price, called Zestimate. Zestimate is very popular, because it provides first time consumers, information about the house and housing market at no cost.“Zestimates” are estimated home values based on millions of statistical and machine learning models that analyze hundreds of data points on each property. By continually improving the median margin of error, from 14% at the onset to 5% today, Zillow has established itself as one of the largest and trusted online real estate database for the US market.Similar house sale predictions have been solved using machine learning. Such an example is at: https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs221/2017/restricted/p-final/ianjones/final.pdf. In the project, selling prices of houses in King County, USA is predicted using a number of factors.The current problem is statement is slightly different in that it does not attempt to predict the selling price, but the logerror for each record. Though the problem statements are different, usual methodologies employed in a machine learning model development, including the above, are applicable to this project.

References:

[1] https://onlinecourses.science.psu.edu/stat501/node/346 https://www.kaggle.com/c/zillow-prize-1/data

[2] https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs221/2017/restricted/p-final/ianjones/final.pdf https://machinelearningmastery.com/feature-selection-machine-learning-python https://machinelearningmastery.com

[3] https://towardsdatascience.com/train-test-split-and-cross-validation-in-python-80b61be ca4b6

[4] http://www.stats.uwo.ca/faculty/braun/ss3850/notes/sas10.pdf https://seaborn.pydata.org/tutorial/distributions.html

[5] https://plot.ly/matplotlib/histograms/

[6] https://towardsdatascience.com/train-test-split-and-cross-validation-in-python-80b61be ca4b6

[7] https://www.analyticsvidhya.com/blog/2016/03/complete-guide-parameter-tuning-xgb oost-with-codes-python/

Keywords:

Zillow, Zestimate, Real Estate, Home Value Estimation, Machine Learning, Predictive Modeling, Logerror Prediction, Housing Market, Kaggle Competition, Statistical Models, Property Data Analysis, Capstone Project, Home Price Prediction, King County Housing Data, Model Evaluation.