Gradient boosting and machine-learning benchmarks

Beyond Hedonic Models: Spatiotemporal, Hierarchical and Probabilistic Architectures for Residential Real Estate Price Forecasting

A pseudo-real-time evaluation on 632,000 Quebec transactions and 82 local market indices, 2021–2026

Simon-Pierre Boucher · UQO Working Papers · October 2026 · v1.1

This paper asks whether new forecasting architectures improve residential price forecasts over strong conventional methods, and under which conditions. Using the audited Quebec land-registry sample of UQO Working Paper 22 (632,006 sales, 2021–2026) and its real-time quality-adjusted index vintages, it defines three…

Forecasting Realized Volatility Across Asset Classes: HAR, GARCH, and Machine Learning in a Unified Multi-Asset Horse Race, 2013–2026

Simon-Pierre Boucher · UQO Working Papers · October 2026 · v0.2

The paper compares 27 forecasts of daily realized variance (six HAR specifications, GARCH, GJR, EGARCH and Realized GARCH, penalized regressions, random forests, XGBoost and LightGBM on two information sets, an LSTM, a Transformer, a LightGBM pooled across assets, and two combinations) on 25 liquid instruments from…

Half a Million Prices, Twenty Models

A Systematic Assessment of Hedonic Specifications and Estimation Methods for the Quebec Housing Market, 2021–2026

Simon-Pierre Boucher · UQO Working Papers · October 2026 · v1.1

Fifty years after Rosen (1974), applied hedonic practice still rests on specification choices (functional form, temporal controls, spatial controls, estimation method) that are made by convention and rarely stress-tested jointly. Using 514,212 Quebec residential sales (2021–2026) whose structural descriptors come from…

Airbnb, Residential Rents, and Housing Market Pressure: A Hedonic and Spatial Econometric Analysis

Simon-Pierre Boucher · UQO Working Papers · October 2026 · v1.1

This paper examines the relationship between short-term rental (STR) activity and residential rents in Quebec, Canada, using a 2026 cross-section of 3,456 Airbnb listings and 8,303 residential rental listings with precise coordinates. For each rental listing the number of Airbnb listings within 250 m, 500 m, 1 km and…

Hedonic Pricing of Short-Term Rental Properties: A Multi-Method Analysis of Airbnb Listing Prices in Quebec

Simon-Pierre Boucher · UQO Working Papers · October 2026 · v1.1

This paper estimates hedonic price functions for a province-wide cross-section of Airbnb listings in Quebec, Canada, from a scrape of 5,000 listing cards collected in early 2026 (3,456 with a displayed price). The displayed price field is bimodal: about 28% of priced listings, mostly small Montreal rental units, show…

Hedonic Housing Price Models for the United States: A Multi-Method Comparison of Parametric, Quantile, and Machine Learning Approaches

Simon-Pierre Boucher · UQO Working Papers · October 2026 · v1.2

This paper compares econometric and machine-learning approaches to hedonic housing valuation on 788,842 active Zillow listings covering all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, and asks how much of the machine-learning advantage survives when models must price homes in markets they have not seen. A semi-log…