Predicting House Rental Prices in Ghana Using Machine Learning
It addresses the need for accurate housing market information for real estate professionals, investors, and policymakers in Ghana, but is incremental as it applies existing methods to a new dataset.
This study tackled the problem of predicting house rental prices in Ghana using machine learning models, with CatBoost achieving the best performance at an R² of 0.876.
This study investigates the efficacy of machine learning models for predicting house rental prices in Ghana, addressing the need for accurate and accessible housing market information. Utilising a comprehensive dataset of rental listings, we trained and evaluated various models, including CatBoost, XGBoost, and Random Forest. CatBoost emerged as the best-performing model, achieving an $R^2$ of 0.876, demonstrating its ability to effectively capture complex relationships within the housing market. Feature importance analysis revealed that location-based features, number of bedrooms, bathrooms, and furnishing status are key drivers of rental prices. Our findings provide valuable insights for stakeholders, including real estate professionals, investors, and policymakers, while also highlighting opportunities for future research, such as incorporating temporal data and exploring regional variations.