Attention-based multi-modal fusion for improved real estate appraisal: a case study in Los Angeles

The geographical presentation of a house, which refers to the sightseeing and topography near the house, is a critical factor to a house buyer. The street map is a type of common data in our daily life, which contains natural geographical presentation. This paper sources real estate data and corresponding street maps of houses in the city of Los Angeles. In the case study, we proposed an innovative method, attention-based multi-modal fusion, to incorporate the geographical presentation from street maps into the real estate appraisal model with a deep neural network. We firstly combine the house attribute features and street map imagery features by applying the attention-based neural network. After that, we apply boosted regression trees to estimate the house price from the fused features. This work explored the potential of attention mechanism and data fusion in the applications of real estate appraisal. The experimental results indicate the competitiveness of proposed method among state-of-the-art methods.