Today real estate market has become very popular, but the housing recovery has pushed up home prices nearly everywhere. In Taizhong, Taiwan has not been the exception, real estate market has expanded in the past couple years to the point where it is attracting interest, not only from other parts of Taiwan but also other parts of the world. An accurate prediction on the house price is important to prospective homeowners, developers, investors, appraisers, tax assessors and other real estate market participants, such as, mortgage lenders and insurers.
Our Institute of Service Science in collaboration with Taiwan's restaurant reservation website EZTABLE, is launching a data mining contest using two years of EZTABLE bookings data. The goal is to predict repeat-booking customers. This Taiwan-based open data mining contest is the first of its kind!
Finally, some new avenues are opening for publishing work on analytics and big data that are not necessarily statistics journals, machine learning journals, or operations research journals. One such avenue is Big Data, an open-access peer-reviewed journal with Vasant Dhar as editor-in-chief. I'm glad to join the editorial board.
Prof. Galit Shmueli, Institute of Service Science, College of Technology Management, National Tsing Hua University, 101 Kuang Fu Road Sec. 2, Hsinchu 30013 Taiwan
