Retail Property Price Index Forecasting through Neural Networks

Rapid growth has been seen in the Chinese housing market during the past decade, and housing price forecasts have become more significant to investors and policy makers. In this study, we explore neural networks for retail property price index forecasts from ten major Chinese cities for July 2005–April 2021. Our goal is to build simple and accurate neural networks to contribute to purely technical forecasts of the Chinese retail property market. To facilitate the analysis, we examine different model settings based on algorithms, delays, hidden neurons, and data splitting ratios and construct a simple neural network with five delays and two hidden neurons. This leads to a rather stable performance of about 1.6% average relative root mean square error across the ten cities for the training, validation, and testing phases. Results here can be used on a stand-alone basis or combined with fundamental forecasts to form perspectives of retail property price trends and conduct policy analyses.