An Integrated Hedonic Pricing and Predictive Modelling Approach: Comparing ML and DL for Dublin’s Rental Market

Zhang, Yihui (2025) An Integrated Hedonic Pricing and Predictive Modelling Approach: Comparing ML and DL for Dublin’s Rental Market. Masters thesis, Dublin, National College of Ireland.

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Abstract

Dublin’s persistent housing crisis has been a critical issue for a long time. While prior research has primarily focused on the property sales market, the rental market also requires attention, especially as rocketing house prices have forced many residents to rely on rented accommodation. This study bridges this gap by proposing a model integrating hedonic regression with predictive modelling to analyse rental prices in Dublin. A key challenge was overcome by conducting web scraping to construct a detailed dataset encompassing core features summarised from the literature review. The dataset was further enhanced through spatial analysis by integrating proximity measures to key external amenities. The findings in this study revealed a significant rental burden issue within Dublin’s housing market, with the Rent-To-Income Ratio (RTR) across all household types exceeding the affordability threshold of 30%. Key features that influence rental prices were identified, including property types, building energy ratings (BER), number of bedrooms and bathrooms, and accessibility to neighbourhood and location facilities and amenities. Among Random Forest, SVR, XGBoost, LightGBM, GBR, and RNNs models, LightGBM was found to achieve the optimised predictive accuracy, with an R2 of 0.79, MSE of 106189.96, MAE of 234.97, RMSE of 325.87, %RMSE of 13.32%, and %MAE of 34.61%.

Item Type:	Thesis (Masters)
Supervisors:	Name Email Sahni, Anu UNSPECIFIED
Subjects:	Q Science > QA Mathematics > Electronic computers. Computer science T Technology > T Technology (General) > Information Technology > Electronic computers. Computer science D History General and Old World > DA Great Britain > Ireland > Dublin H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor > Housing Q Science > Q Science (General) > Self-organizing systems. Conscious automata > Machine learning
Divisions:	School of Computing > Master of Science in Data Analytics
Depositing User:	Ciara O'Brien
Date Deposited:	18 Nov 2025 18:02
Last Modified:	18 Nov 2025 18:02
URI:	https://norma.ncirl.ie/id/eprint/8947

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