Assignment task: Business Case
A property assessor's office in a midwestern state of the USA is in the process of updating their property (housing) price assessment method where they want to apply a data driven technique. The trial dataset consists of 113 variables describing 3970 property sales in the area between 2006 and 2010. The management is very keen to apply predictive modelling for this task where the data setis to be used to build and evaluate predictive models to ascertain the feasibility of such an approach.The company has outsourced the task to you.
Part A: Problem Formulation
The objective of this section (Part A) is to introduce students to the 'domain understanding and familiarisation' phase data analysts go through prior to the actual analytics. Since you may have to carry out analytics projects in different domains in the future, where you may not have domain knowledge, it is important to develop this skill.
a) Carry out an exploratory study to identify the background and relevant aspects of properties which influence their value in the USA and methods used for property price evaluation and assessment?
b) Identify the data sources that would contain information useful for property value assessment. What is the possible format of such information? Will you face any problems in accessing these data?
c) What variables would be useful to build a predictive model to assess the property price?