Pre-owned housing price index forecasts using Gaussian process regressions

Purpose
The purpose of this study is to make property price forecasts for the Chinese housing market that has grown rapidly in the last 10 years, which is an important concern for both government and investors.


Design/methodology/approach
This study examines Gaussian process regressions with different kernels and basis functions for monthly pre-owned housing price index estimates for ten major Chinese cities from March 2012 to May 2020. The authors do this by using Bayesian optimizations and cross-validation.


Findings
The ten price indices from June 2019 to May 2020 are accurately predicted out-of-sample by the established models, which have relative root mean square errors ranging from 0.0458% to 0.3035% and correlation coefficients ranging from 93.9160% to 99.9653%.


Originality/value
The results might be applied separately or in conjunction with other forecasts to develop hypotheses regarding the patterns in the pre-owned residential real estate price index and conduct further policy research.