Study on Average Housing Prices in the Inland Capital Cities of China by Night-time Light Remote Sensing and Official Statistics Data

In this paper, the annually average Defense Meteorological Satellite Program-Operational Linescan System (DMSP/OLS) night-time light data is first proposed as a surrogate indicator to mine and forecast the average housing prices in the inland capital cities of China. First, based on the time-series analysis of individual cities, five regression models with gross error elimination are established between average night-time light intensity (ANLI) and average commercial residential housing price (ACRHP) adjusted by annual inflation rate or not from 2002 to 2013. Next, an optimal model is selected for predicting the ACRHPs in 2014 of these capital cities, and then verified by the interval estimation and corresponding official statistics. Finally, experimental results show that the quadratic polynomial regression is the optimal mining model for estimating the ACRHP without adjustments in most provincial capitals and the predicted ACRHP of these cities are almost in their interval estimations except for the overrated Chengdu and the underestimated Wuhan, while the adjusted ACRHP is all in prediction interval. Overall, this paper not only provides a novel insight into time-series ACRHP data mining based on time-series ANLI for capital city scale but also reveals the potentiality and mechanism of the comprehensive ANLI to characterize the complicated ACRHP. Besides, other factors influencing housing prices, such as the time-series lags of government policy, are tested and analysed in this paper.