Modelling Predictability of Airbnb Rental Prices in Post COVID-19 Regime: An Integrated Framework of Transfer Learning, PSO-Based Ensemble Machine Learning and Explainable AI

Indranil Ghosh, Manas K. Sanyal () and Dragan Pamucar ()
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Indranil Ghosh: IT & Analytics Area, Institute of Management Technology Hyderabad, Shamshabad, Hyderabad 501218, Telangana, India
Manas K. Sanyal: ��University of Kalyani, Kayani, Nadia, West Bengal 741235, India
Dragan Pamucar: ��Faculty of Organizational Sciences, University of Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia

International Journal of Information Technology & Decision Making (IJITDM), 2023, vol. 22, issue 03, 917-955

Abstract: In this research, an effort has been put to develop an integrated predictive modeling framework to automatically estimate the rental price of Airbnb units based on listed descriptions and several accommodation-related utilities. This paper considers approximately 0.2 million listings of Airbnb units across seven European cities, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Brussels, Geneva, Istanbul, London, and Milan, after the COVID-19 pandemic for predictive analysis. RoBERTa, a transfer learning framework in conjunction with K-means-based unsupervised text clustering, was used to form a homogeneous grouping of Airbnb units across the cities. Subsequently, particle swarm optimization (PSO) driven advanced ensemble machine learning frameworks have been utilized for predicting rental prices across the formed clusters of respective cities using 32 offer-related features. Additionally, explainable artificial intelligence (AI), an emerging field of AI, has been utilized to interpret the high-end predictive modeling to infer deeper insights into the nature and direction of influence of explanatory features on rental prices at respective locations. The rental prices of Airbnb units in Geneva and Brussels have appeared to be highly predictable, while the units in London and Milan have been found to be less predictable. Different types of amenity offerings largely explain the variation in rental prices across the cities.

Keywords: Airbnb; rental price; transfer learning; RoBERTa algorithm; text clustering; PSO; Explainable AI (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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DOI: 10.1142/S0219622022500602

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