Predicting the Vitality of Stores Along the Street Based on Business Type Sequence via Recurrent Neural Network

The rational planning of store types and locations to maximize street vitality is essential in real estate planning. Traditional business planning relies heavily on the subjective experience of developers. Currently, developers have access to low-resolution urban data to support their decision making, and researchers have done much image-based machine learning research from the scale of urban texture. However, there is still a lack of research on the functional layout with shop-level accuracy. This paper uses a sequence-based neural network (RNN) to explore the relationship between the sequence of store types along a street and its commercial vitality. Currently, the use of RNNs in the architectural and urban fields is very rare. We use customer review data of 80streets from O2O platforms to represent the store vitality degree. In the machine learning model, the input is the sequence of store types on the street, and the output is the corresponding sequence of business vitality indexes. After training and evaluation, the model was shown to have acceptable accuracy. We further combined this evaluation model with a genetic algorithm to develop a business planning optimization tool to maximize the overall street business value, thus guiding real estate business planning at a high resolution.