Group 3 Overview

PROPOSAL

POSTER

APPLICATION

REPORT

Motivation

Singapore becomes the world’s 5th most expensive place to rent a house, according to Nested.com (a UK based property website). By average, the rental is at $4.73 psf, which makes a monthly rent of $1,985 for an individual and $3,766 for a family. Given the current market condition, there are a lot of search, filter, and comparison work to do for every house seeker to find a suitable home with good price.

There are a wide variety of property searching apps and website in the world, with a smart selection function for the user to filter their favor and find the ideal house. However, currently most property portals only provide a mean to search and display a list of houses based on the filter criteria like price, house size, and bedrooms etc. It does not offer visualization summary in graphs for exploration of number of match-criteria houses in different districts, property distance to metro station or shopping malls and also comparisons for different houses types.

Objective

As data analyst, we are keen to provide a customized visualization tool that can reveal all the relationship among the property features--not only can select the ideal house for the client, but all also demonstrate the parameters' relationship. Users are able to get a visual summary for the property rental market and interact with the visualization via zoom, search, filter and comparison by information factors like rental price, house size, and distance to metro station etc.

Selection of Tools

Since this course aims at pursuing the good command of R language, for the display part we will choose R to implement our visualization. To be more precise, we will use R Markdown and the other relevant package like ggplot2,and JavaScript library like d3.js, leafnet.js. At the data preparation step, we will take advantage of JMP Pro and Tableau as well.

Design Framework

Guided by the visual information seeking mantra “overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand, We aim to, first of all, provide a parallel coordinate graph which lists all the criteria (district, price, house size, bedrooms, distance to metro station and shopping malls etc.) In the line bar, there will be a brush box for each data point. By drag and move the brush, relevant lines across all the bars will be highlighted and display the selected cluster data characteristics.

In addition, we will also show all the match-criteria houses in a tree map with color areas or in a territory map with number bubbles showing the district average price per psm and/or the number of houses. Filters are used here to select houses with above mentioned criteria. It gives the user a holistic view of summary for all the available properties. And if possible, we will also add features of zooming in and out to allow user to see more detail in particular interested area and show a list of available properties by clicking on the bubble number.

Lastly, we plan to display a scatter plot chart to show off the position for the selected property and some nearby houses in the same district and a trend line of average district rental price for comparison. This will help the user to compare the house price and choose the most desired one.

Challenge

1.The interaction of multiple graphs and maps with criteria filter.
2.To retrieve the geocode for each property and plot the distance to metro station.
3.To create the interactive parallel coordinate graph with brush box feature.
4.Find the most suitable tools and libraries to implement the visual features.

Reference

[1]http://www.science.smith.edu/classwiki/images/c/cd/Informationvisualization2.pdf
[2] https://eagereyes.org/techniques/parallel-coordinates