HomeFinder Revisited: Finding Ideal Homes with Reachability-Centric Multi-Criteria Decision Making

Finding an ideal home is a difficult and laborious process. One of the most crucial factors in this process is the reachability between the home location and the concerned points of interest, such as places of work and recreational facilities. However, such importance is unrecognized in the extant real estate systems. By characterizing user requirements and analytical tasks in the context of finding ideal homes, we designed ReACH, a novel visual analytics system that assists people in finding, evaluating, and choosing a home based on multiple criteria, including reachability. In addition, we developed an improved data-driven model for approximating reachability with massive taxi trajectories. This model enables users to interactively integrate their knowledge and preferences to make judicious and informed decisions. We show the improvements in our model by comparing the theoretical complexities with the prior study and demonstrate the usability and effectiveness of the proposed system with task-based evaluation.