Planning to rent a room in the Silicon Valley in 2016? This tool may help.

 

The Shiny 'Roominator' - Silicon Valley Room Rent Estimator

If you are planning to rent a room in Silicon Valley circa 2016, I have good news and bad news for you. The bad news is that it's expensive, very expensive! The good news is that I did some of the ground work research for you. The 'Roominator" tool is the result of many hours of painstakingly mining through data in popular websites. Armed with that data, I then built a statistical model that tries to predict the rent you are likely to pay based on a number of factors. Here's the link to my app:

THE ROOMINATOR

Note: takes a few seconds to load.

How it works

The dataset is used to build a linear regression (prediction) model based on the room size ('square footage'), the town where it's located, and whether or not the room has a private bathroom. The application displays an histogram with a density plot based on the selected parameters to give the user a sense of the rent price distribution. A rent prediction including upper and lower prediction interval bounds is also displayed based on the confidence level the user selects.

Instructions

1) Using the Left panel, select the town where the room is located, the room size ('square footage'), and whether or not the room has a private bathroom.

2) Select a confidence level for the rent prediction. The lower the confidence, the narrower the resulting prediction interval will be.

3) The right panel displays an histogram for the datapoints found in the dataset matching the left panel selections. A density plot estimate is overlayed with the histogram (you can think of this as an 'estimate' of the underlying rent price distribution).

4) The median, mean and predicted rents are calculated and displayed on the right panel.

 

The Roominator Interface

  

Enjoy! 

Comments, questions, suggestions? You can reach me at: contact (at sign) paulorenato (dot) com 

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