Kaggle Top1% Solution: Predicting Housing Prices in Moscow

This project was completed by students graduated from NYC Data Science Academy 12-week Data Science Bootcamp. Ranked #15 out of 3,274 teams on Kaggle Team Members - Brandy Freitas, Chase Edge and Grant Webb Given 4 years of housing price data in a foreign market, predicting the following year’s prices should be pretty straightforward, right? But what if in that last year of data, the country’s stock market, the value of its currency and the price of its number 1 export, all dropped by nearly 50%. And on top of all that, the country was slapped with economic sanctions by the EU and the US. This was Moscow in 2014 and as you can see, it was anything but straightforward. We were able to overcome these challenges and in the two weeks of working together, were able to achieve a top 1% ranking on Kaggle. Our success is a product of our in depth data cleaning, feature engineering and our approach to modeling. With a focus on interpretability and simplicity, we begin modeling using linear regression and decision trees which gave us a better understanding of the data. We then utilized more complicated models such as random forests and XGBoost which ultimately resulted in our top submission.