Enhancing geospatial prediction models with feature engineering from road networks: a graph-driven approach

Abstract

Traditional geospatial predictive models for property valuation have naturally relied on coordinates as well as ‘hedonic’ (internal and external) features. In particular, location-centric methods such as Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) and Kriging have focused on intrinsic target characteristics together with distances between individual targets. However, especially in the context of heavily urbanized areas, these approaches might overlook crucial aspects arising from the underlying topological structure that presents itself in such areas. Concretely, in this work, we focus on the structure arising from the road network connecting properties. We introduce a novel though straightforward technique for feature engineering based on graphs constructed on a road network. We then extract relevant features from these and utilize those as inputs for predictive models and assess their performance benefits when used together with a variety of both well-known geospatial models and state-of-art machine learning models. To this end, we present an exhaustive experiment using four different real-life data sets across various regions and exhibiting sizes outperforming many comparative works in the field. Our findings reveal that our feature engineering approach offers significant improvements in predictive performance. Finally, we apply Shapley values as an interpretability technique to confirm the reliability and effectiveness of our approach.