Linking repeated subjective judgments and ConvNets for multimodal assessment of the immediate living environment

MethodsX. 2024 Jan 5:12:102556. doi: 10.1016/j.mex.2024.102556. eCollection 2024 Jun.

Abstract

The integration of alternative data extraction approaches for multimodal data, can significantly reduce modeling difficulties for the automatic location assessment. We develop a method for assessing the quality of the immediate living environment by incorporating human judgments as ground truth into a neural network for generating new synthetic data and testing the effects in surrogate hedonic models. We expect that the quality of the data will be less biased if the annotation is performed by multiple independent persons applying repeated trials which should reduce the overall error variance and lead to more robust results. Experimental results show that linking repeated subjective judgements and Deep Learning can reliably determine the quality scores and thus expand the range of information for the quality assessment. The presented method is not computationally intensive, can be performed repetitively and can also be easily adapted to machine learning approaches in a broader sense or be transferred to other use cases. Following aspects are essential for the implementation of the method:•Sufficient amount of representative data for human assessment.•Repeated assessment trials by individuals.•Confident derivation of the effect of human judgments on property price as an approbation for further generation of synthetic data.

Keywords: Affective content analysis; Alternative forced choice; Assessment of the quality of the immediate living environment; Computer vision; Elo rating; Hedonic pricing; Location analysis.