An improved artificial gorilla troops optimizer for BP neural network-based housing price prediction

In the context of global economic austerity in the post epidemic era, housing, as one of the basic human needs, has become particularly important for accurate prediction of house prices. BP neural network is widely used in prediction tasks, but their performance is easily affected by weights and biases, and thus metaheuristic algorithms are needed to optimize the network parameters. Firstly, to address the shortcomings of the artificial Gorilla Troops Optimizer (GTO) in such optimization tasks, such as reduced population diversity, easy to fall into local optimal solutions and slow convergence, this paper proposes a fitness allocation strategy, a Cauchy variation strategy, and an elite evolution mechanism to improve the algorithm, which in turn results in an improved artificial Gorilla Troops Optimizer (IGTO). Subsequently, a BP neural network house price prediction model based on IGTO is constructed and experiments are conducted on four datasets, namely, Boston, California-Bay, California-Land and Taiwan. The experiments are first compared with eleven other swarm intelligence algorithms and then with four machine learning models, and the results show that IGTO-BPNN improved 17.66%, 18.27%, 28.10%, 49.35% and 24.83% on five evaluation metrics, namely, MAE, MAPE, R2, RMSE, and SMAPE, respectively. The improvement of these indicators fully proves the superiority and effectiveness of IGTO-BPNN in house price prediction.