I’ll take a stab at this one. Look at my notes/comments embedded in the code. Keep in mind, this is just a few ideas that I tested. There are all kinds of other things you can try (get more data, test different models, etc.)

import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns
#%matplotlib inline
import sklearn
from sklearn.linear_model import RidgeCV, LassoCV, Ridge, Lasso
from sklearn.datasets import load_boston
#boston = load_boston()

# Predicting Continuous Target Variables with Regression Analysis
df = pd.read_csv('C:\\your_path_here\\AB_NYC_2019.csv')
df

# get only 2 fields and convert non-numerics to numerics
df_new = df[['neighbourhood']]
df_new = pd.get_dummies(df_new)
# print(df_new.columns.values)

# df_new.shape
# df.shape

# let's use a feature selection technique so we can see which features (independent variables) have the highest statistical influence on the target (dependent variable).
from sklearn.ensemble import RandomForestClassifier
features = df_new.columns.values
clf = RandomForestClassifier()
clf.fit(df_new[features], df['price'])

# from the calculated importances, order them from most to least important
# and make a barplot so we can visualize what is/isn't important
importances = clf.feature_importances_
sorted_idx = np.argsort(importances)

# what kind of object is this
# type(sorted_idx)
padding = np.arange(len(features)) + 0.5
plt.barh(padding, importances[sorted_idx], align='center')
plt.yticks(padding, features[sorted_idx])
plt.xlabel("Relative Importance")
plt.title("Variable Importance")
plt.show()

X = df_new[features]
y = df['price']


reg = LassoCV()
reg.fit(X, y)
print("Best alpha using built-in LassoCV: %f" % reg.alpha_)
print("Best score using built-in LassoCV: %f" %reg.score(X,y))
coef = pd.Series(reg.coef_, index = X.columns)

print("Lasso picked " + str(sum(coef != 0)) + " variables and eliminated the other " +  str(sum(coef == 0)) + " variables")

Result:

Best alpha using built-in LassoCV: 0.040582
Best score using built-in LassoCV: 0.103947
Lasso picked 78 variables and eliminated the other 146 variables

Next step…

imp_coef = coef.sort_values()
import matplotlib
matplotlib.rcParams['figure.figsize'] = (8.0, 10.0)
imp_coef.plot(kind = "barh")
plt.title("Feature importance using Lasso Model")


# get the top 25; plotting fewer features so we can actually read the chart
type(imp_coef)
imp_coef = imp_coef.tail(25)
matplotlib.rcParams['figure.figsize'] = (8.0, 10.0)
imp_coef.plot(kind = "barh")
plt.title("Feature importance using Lasso Model")

X = df_new
y = df['price']


from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split
X_train, X_test, y_train, y_test = train_test_split(X, y, test_size = 0.2, random_state = 10)

# Training the Model
# We will now train our model using the LinearRegression function from the sklearn library.

from sklearn.linear_model import LinearRegression
lm = LinearRegression()
lm.fit(X_train, y_train)

# Prediction
# We will now make prediction on the test data using the LinearRegression function and plot a scatterplot between the test data and the predicted value.
prediction = lm.predict(X_test)
plt.scatter(y_test, prediction)


from sklearn import metrics
from sklearn.metrics import r2_score
print('MAE', metrics.mean_absolute_error(y_test, prediction))
print('MSE', metrics.mean_squared_error(y_test, prediction))
print('RMSE', np.sqrt(metrics.mean_squared_error(y_test, prediction)))
print('R squared error', r2_score(y_test, prediction))

Result:

MAE 1004799260.0756996
MSE 9.87308783180938e+21
RMSE 99363412943.64531
R squared error -2.603867717517002e+17

This is horrible! Well, we know this doesn’t work. Let’s try something else. We still need to rowk with numeric data so let’s try lng and lat coordinates.

X = df[['longitude','latitude']]
y = df['price']

from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split
X_train, X_test, y_train, y_test = train_test_split(X, y, test_size = 0.2, random_state = 10)

# Training the Model
# We will now train our model using the LinearRegression function from the sklearn library.

from sklearn.linear_model import LinearRegression
lm = LinearRegression()
lm.fit(X_train, y_train)

# Prediction
# We will now make prediction on the test data using the LinearRegression function and plot a scatterplot between the test data and the predicted value.
prediction = lm.predict(X_test)
plt.scatter(y_test, prediction)

df1 = pd.DataFrame({'Actual': y_test, 'Predicted':prediction})
df2 = df1.head(10)
df2
df2.plot(kind = 'bar')

from sklearn import metrics
from sklearn.metrics import r2_score
print('MAE', metrics.mean_absolute_error(y_test, prediction))
print('MSE', metrics.mean_squared_error(y_test, prediction))
print('RMSE', np.sqrt(metrics.mean_squared_error(y_test, prediction)))
print('R squared error', r2_score(y_test, prediction))
# better but not awesome

Result:

MAE 85.35438165291622
MSE 36552.6244271195
RMSE 191.18740655994972
R squared error 0.03598346983552425

Let’s look at OLS:

import statsmodels.api as sm
model = sm.OLS(y, X).fit()


# run the model and interpret the predictions
predictions = model.predict(X)
# Print out the statistics
model.summary()

I would hypothesize the following:

One hot encoding is doing exactly what it is supposed to do, but it is not helping you get the results you want. Using lng/lat, is performing slightly better, but this too, is not helping you achieve the results you want. As you know, you must work with numeric data for a regression problem, but none of the features is helping you to predict price, at least not very well. Of course, I could have made a mistake somewhere. If I did make a mistake, please let me know!

Check out the links below for a good example of using various features to predict housing prices. Notice: all variables are numeric, and the results are pretty decent (just around 70%, give or take, but still much better than what we’re seeing with the Air BNB data set).

https://bigdata-madesimple.com/how-to-run-linear-regression-in-python-scikit-learn/

https://towardsdatascience.com/linear-regression-on-boston-housing-dataset-f409b7e4a155