A Web-based visual analytics system for real estate data

Abstract

Real estate is an important industry in most countries. However, the analysis of the real estate market is very challenging as the data are high dimensional and have complex spatial and temporal patterns. In this paper, we present a novel Web-based visual analytics system, which integrates state-of-the-art interactive visualizations to enable end users to create their own visualizations and gain insight into the real estate market. The system is implemented using the new features in HTML5, which are natively supported in current browsers. We adopt a coordinated view design in our system consisting of four major components: a map view to show the geographical information of houses, a stacked graph view to show the evolution of house sales over time, a pixel-bar view to visualize multiple attributes of houses, and a treemap view to present the hierarchical structure of the data. Novel clutter reduction methods and rich user interactions are further proposed to enhance the flexibility and analytical ability of the whole system. We have applied our system to real property market data and obtained some interesting findings. Moreover, feedback from the end users of our system is very positive.