Optimizing Machine Learning Models for Urban Studies: A Comparative Analysis of Hyperparameter Tuning Methods

The advancement of urban scholarship and the effective addressing of urban environment challenges necessitate the adoption of sophisticated analytical methods. Urban scholars and policymakers need advanced analytical methods to tackle issues like gentrification, housing affordability, and urban sprawl. Predictive models are crucial in the realm of urban studies, and hyperparameter tuning methods can significantly improve their accuracy and efficiency. Our study compares three such methods Optuna, Random Search, and Grid Search using a housing transaction dataset. We find that Optuna is not only 4 to 6 times faster than the other two methods when applied to Gradient Boosting Machine and Random Forest algorithms, but also achieves lower error values in key evaluation metrics on the test set, such as mean absolute error, mean squared error, mean absolute percentage error and root mean squared error.