+++ draft = false +++

Travelling Image

Business Understanding

I love to travel and usually when I have time and money, I pack my bags and hit the road. One of the issues affecting my travel budget is the cost of accommodation (hotel…). Recently, when I joined the program on Udacity, I got data about housing prices in Boston. Let’s study housing prices in Boston with me. There are 3 questions that I am interested in when looking at this data:

  • Question 1: What are prices in cities in a specified timeframe?
  • Question 2: What are the factors that impact prices?
  • Question 3: How much the price for given house ?

Prerequisites

Housing price data is downloaded from Kaggle at the following link Boston data on Kaggle

Data Understanding

In the Boston data, there are some files:

  • calendar.csv: Calendar, including listing id and the price and availability for that day
  • listing.csv: Listings, including full descriptions and average review score
  • reviews.csv: Reviews, including a unique id for each reviewer and detailed comments

We take alook about Boston data.

Gather data

We can display the data by looking at data frames the calendar, listing, and reviews



Calendar sample data

Index listing_id date available price
0 12147973 9/5/2017 f NaN
1 12147973 9/4/2017 f NaN
2 12147973 9/3/2017 f NaN
3 12147973 9/2/2017 f NaN
4 12147973 9/1/2017 f NaN

The prices will be NaN in the cases there is no available (value got f)

Listing sample data

Index id listing_url scrape_id last_scraped name summary space description experiences_offered neighborhood_overview … review_scores_value requires_license license jurisdiction_names instant_bookable cancellation_policy require_guest_profile_picture require_guest_phone_verification calculated_host_listings_count reviews_per_month
0 12147973 https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/12147973 2.01609E+13 9/7/2016 Sunny Bungalow in the City Cozy, sunny, family home. Master bedroom high… The house has an open and cozy feel at the sam… Cozy, sunny, family home. Master bedroom high… none Roslindale is quiet, convenient and friendly. … … NaN f NaN NaN f moderate f f 1 NaN
1 3075044 https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/3075044 2.01609E+13 9/7/2016 Charming room in pet friendly apt Charming and quiet room in a second floor 1910… Small but cozy and quite room with a full size… Charming and quiet room in a second floor 1910… none The room is in Roslindale, a diverse and prima… … 9 f NaN NaN t moderate f f 1 1.3
2 6976 https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/6976 2.01609E+13 9/7/2016 Mexican Folk Art Haven in Boston Come stay with a friendly, middle-aged guy in … Come stay with a friendly, middle-aged guy in … Come stay with a friendly, middle-aged guy in … none The LOCATION: Roslindale is a safe and diverse… … 10 f NaN NaN f moderate t f 1 0.47
3 1436513 https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/1436513 2.01609E+13 9/7/2016 Spacious Sunny Bedroom Suite in Historic Home Come experience the comforts of home away from… Most places you find in Boston are small howev… Come experience the comforts of home away from… none Roslindale is a lovely little neighborhood loc… … 10 f NaN NaN f moderate f f 1 1
4 7651065 https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/7651065 2.01609E+13 9/7/2016 Come Home to Boston My comfy, clean and relaxing home is one block… Clean, attractive, private room, one block fro… My comfy, clean and relaxing home is one block… none I love the proximity to downtown, the neighbor… … 10 f NaN NaN f flexible f f 1 2.25

In the data, we can see there are mixed values of text, numeric and boolean values. The listing data include information about all listings such as how many bedrooms, bedroom types and prices in normal cases
Reviews sample data

Index listing_id id date reviewer_id reviewer_name comments
0 1178162 4724140 5/21/2013 4298113 Olivier My stay at islam’s place was really cool! Good…
1 1178162 4869189 5/29/2013 6452964 Charlotte Great location for both airport and city - gre…
2 1178162 5003196 6/6/2013 6449554 Sebastian We really enjoyed our stay at Islams house. Fr…
3 1178162 5150351 6/15/2013 2215611 Marine The room was nice and clean and so were the co…
4 1178162 5171140 6/16/2013 6848427 Andrew Great location. Just 5 mins walk from the Airp…

Evaluation

After doing data manipulation, I use it to answer 3 questions

Question 1: What are prices in cities in a specified timeframe?

I will do the calculation of the group by city and month (new added field) and calculate the mean value. Since the listing prices are taken on a daily basis, for the convenience of monthly calculations, we will calculate the mean price by month.

Visualize the data

df_listing

  • In the chart, we can see Charlestown city has the highest price (with a mean price 340$/day) and West Roxbury has the lowest price every month.
  • Some cities are having a stable price in all months: Watertown, Milton
  • Except for Boston (common location), some cities have a big difference in prices in day and month. Min price at Oct and Max price at Apr
    • Dorchester has a low price at 22$/day

We can see that:

  • In the chart, we can see Charlestown city has the highest price (with a mean price 340$/day) and West Roxbury has the lowest price every month.
  • Some cities are having a stable price in all months: Watertown, Milton
  • Except for Boston (common location), some cities have a big difference in prices in day and month. Min price at Oct and Max price at Apr
    • Dorchester has a low price at 22$/day

It’s June now, if you want to go to Boston then I think you can consider West Roxbury as the place with the cheapest housing price

Question 2: What are most factor impact to price ?

In the listing, we want to investigate how properties impact price. We will visualize by their coefficients.

Visualize coefficients

We can see that some features mostly impact to price: weekly_price, monthly_price , accommodates, bedrooms, square_feet. There are features that lowest impact to price: acceptance_rate, reviews_per_month

headmap

If we want to rent a house having large accommodates, bedrooms, square feets then the prices will be high. To save the housing price we can choose small accommodates, bedrooms, square feets

Question 3: Predict price

As in question 1, West Roxbury is an attractive place for me. However, here, there are no houses that have accommodations = 10. I am wondering if there are any houses with such accommodations, what will be the price?

Now let’s try to get a record from West Roxbury city and add the accommodates information (value will be 10) and run it through the trained model.

As you can see, the result will be 55.3$. I think this is a good price for a trip here !

I hope you had a great time reading the article !

For the source code, you can refer on Github