How Does Built Environment Influence Housing Prices in Large-Scale Areas? An Interpretable Machine Learning Method by Considering Multi-Dimensional Accessibility

The housing prices are crucial to the sustainable development of the real estate market. Nowadays, few academic attempts have focused on the impact of multi-dimensional accessibility on housing prices in a large-scale area. This study utilized machine learning methods to extract indicators of the visual environment from street view images. The indicators were combined with multiple sources of spatiotemporal geographic big data, such as second-hand housing data and online map POIs, to quantify the factors of housing prices. Both the hedonic price model and random forest were constructed, with Shapley additive explanations applied to interpret the results. Our work took Shanghai as a case study, and the results indicate that the random forest exhibits superior performance compared to the hedonic price model. The location accessibility (e.g., distance to the CBD) is paramount, and functional accessibility (e.g., to subways and finance facilities) exhibits nonlinear thresholds. We further uncovered the characteristics of the nonlinear relationship between visual environmental factors and housing prices. Our findings can deepen the understanding of housing price variation in the spatial dimension and provide the theoretical basis for ensuring the optimization of urban planning.