A Production-Oriented Machine Learning Pipeline for Real Estate Mass Appraisal with Official Geospatial Feature Engineering
Resumo
Real estate mass appraisal underpins fair property taxation in Brazilian municipalities, but attributes that curated-dataset models rely on are unavailable in official cadastral systems at inference time. We present a production-oriented pipeline that restricts features to attributes derivable from the municipal IPTU cadastre, standardizes territory through a spatial join with official shapefiles, and uses a large language model offline to encode neighborhoods into ten locational tiers, persisted as a versioned artifact never invoked at serving time. Among three tree-based ensembles evaluated on about 35,000 deduplicated listings under stratified 5-fold cross-validation with a 90/10 split, CatBoost reaches a holdout mean absolute error near BRL 222,000 to 225,000, R2 around 0.89, and a median absolute percentage error close to 11%; coordinates with the language-model group match the full baseline using fewer features.
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