The PASS speakers were announced a quite a number of weeks ago now for PASS 2015 in October – and I felt pretty damn honored to be one of the 160 or so selected to speak at the conference (…and as a quick aside I also note a reasonably large contingent of Aussie & Kiwi presenters too!).

It will be my 2nd conference, and first time speaking at it.

Exciting?  Absolutely!  Nervous?  Absolutely!  

So what is my topic I hear you *think* – and why might it be interesting to you? (read on!)

So, Whats all the Fuss About House Prices, eh?

Why do people all around the world (and certainly in Australia) focus so much time and energy on whether house prices will go up, or will go down?  Why is it that people stress about how much they need to spend to get that perfect house?  Have you ever wondered what features actually drives house prices or wanted to predict a pricing outcome in advance?  How do you know if a feature influences house prices or not?  Or by how much?

Is the amount of crime a factor?

What about number of schools?

Perhaps it’s whether people are employed or not?

Just maybe it’s really possible that historical prices actually do drive future prices?

…Or perhaps it’s simply just as Real Estate Agents want us to believe — it’s all down to their “Extensive Market Experience“?

Its some of these very questions that I am aiming to answer in my PASS 2015 session Using Azure Machine Learning to Predict Seattle House Prices.

I’m no Real Estate Agent – so my session isn’t about spruiking off-the-plan condos in Florida – but at the core the session will focus on using Azure Machine Learning (ML), Regression and other Statistical Techniques to build predictive models to make value predictions all within the interesting context of Seattle house prices and census related data.

Last Minute Caveat – OK, so the PASS legal team have advised me that I can’t promise I’m going to save you a few hundred grand on your next house purchase (er, so I won’t, not now anyway) – but I can aim to make the session as fun and interactive as possible while in the process of learning about Azure ML Regression!

Now enough about that already!  

So what was my experience of submitting a PASS session, and how did the process unfold?  Well this really warrants the subject of its very own post here.

Hope to see you at PASS 2015!

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