Particle Swarm Optimization in Machine Learning Prediction of Airbnb Hospitality Price Prediction

Abstract

Particle Swarm Optimization is a metaheuristics algorithm widely used for optimization problems. This paper presents the research design and implementation of using Particle Swarm Optimization to automate the features selections in the machine learning models for Airbnb price prediction. Today, Airbnb is changing the business models of the hospitality industry globally. While a bigger impact has been given by the Airbnb community to the local economic development of each country, there has been very little effort that investigates on Airbnb pricing issue with machine learning techniques. Focusing on Airbnb Singapore, the main problem on the dataset is the low correlation of the independent variables to the hospitality price. Choosing the best combination of the independent variables is essential, which can be achieved through features selection optimization. Particle Swarm Optimization is useful to optimize the best variables combination for automating the features selection in machine learning models. By comparing the magnitude of change of the R squared values before and after the use of PSO feature selection, the result showed that the automated features selection has improved the results of all the machine learning algorithms mainly in the linear-based machine learning (Linear Regression, Lasso, Ridge). Keywords—Machine Learning, Automated Features Selection, Particle Swarm Optimization, Airbnb