Improving House Price Prediction Models: Exploring the Impact of Macroeconomic Features

Sammanfattning: This thesis investigates if house price prediction models perform better when adding macroe- conomic features to a data set with only house-specific features. Previous research has shown that tree-based models perform well when predicting house prices, especially the algorithms random forest and XGBoost. It is common to rely entirely on house-specific features when training these models. However, studies show that macroeconomic variables such as interest rate, inflation, and GDP affect house prices. Therefore it makes sense to include them in these models and study if they outperform the more traditional models with only house-specific features. The thesis also investigates which algorithm, out of random forest and XGBoost is better at predicting house prices. The results show that the mean absolute error is lower for the XGBoost and random forest models trained on data with macroeconomic features. Furthermore, XGBoost outperformed random forest regardless of the set of features. In Con- clusion, the suggestion is to include macroeconomic features and use the XGBoost algorithm when predicting house prices.