Zillow: Transforming real estate through big data and machine learning

Zillow pioneered providing access to unprecedented information about the housing market. Long gone are the days when you needed an agent to get comparables and prior sale and listing data. And with more data, data science has enabled more use cases. Jasjeet Thind explains how Zillow uses Spark and machine learning to transform real estate.

Zillow, the nation’s number-one real estate website and mobile app, pioneered providing access to unprecedented information about the housing market. Long gone are the days when you needed an agent to get comparables and prior sale and listing data. Enter Zillow, the nation’s number-one real estate website and mobile app. With more data, data science has enabled more use cases. Jasjeet Thind explores Zillow’s big data platform, discusses some of its core machine-learning algorithms, and outlines best practices for scaling streaming data ingestion and data processing in Spark. Topics include: