House price prediction using a hybrid GRU–MLP based on binary whale optimization algorithm and ant colony optimization for hyperparameter tuning

Abstract Accurate house price prediction is essential for real estate valuation, investment planning, and intelligent property decision-support systems. This study proposes an optimized hybrid deep learning framework that integrates a Gated Recurrent Unit and Multilayer Perceptron model with the Binary Whale Optimization Algorithm for feature selection and Ant Colony Optimization for hyperparameter tuning. The proposed framework was evaluated using a publicly available Kaggle house price regression dataset containing 500 housing records with structural, locational, and amenity-related attributes. The dataset was divided into training, validation, and testing subsets using a 70:20:10 ratio, and leakage-free normalization was applied using only the training data. Experimental results show that the proposed BWOA–ACO–GRU–MLP model outperformed standalone GRU, MLP, CNN, LSTM, and BiLSTM models. It achieved an MSE of 0.0146, MAE of 0.1051, RMSE of 0.1208, MAPE of 0.0112, MedAE of 0.0969, and an R 2 of 99.04%. These results demonstrate that combining feature selection, hyperparameter optimization, and hybrid neural regression improves prediction accuracy and model stability for house price estimation. The proposed framework provides a reliable data-driven approach for smart real estate valuation applications.