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…