Advanced Machine Learning Algorithms for House Price Prediction: Case Study in Kuala Lumpur

House price is affected significantly by several factors and determining a reasonable house price involves a calculative process. This paper proposes advanced machine learning (ML) approaches for house price prediction. Two recent advanced ML algorithms, namely LightGBM and XGBoost were compared with two traditional approaches: multiple regression analysis and ridge regression. This study utilizes a secondary dataset called `Property Listing in Kuala Lumpur', gathered from Kaggle and Google Map, containing 21984 observations with 11 variables, including a target variable. The performance of the ML models was evaluated using mean absolute error (MAE), root mean square error (RMSE), and adjusted r-squared value. The findings revealed that the house price prediction model based on XGBoost showed the highest performance by generating the lowest MAE and RMSE, and the closest adjusted r-squared value to one, consistently outperformed other ML models. A new dataset which consists of 1300 samples was deployed at the model deployment stage. It was found that the percentage of the variance between the actual and predicted price was relatively small, which indicated that this model is reliable and acceptable. This study can greatly assist in predicting future house prices and the establishment of real estate policies.