Title: Predicting Auction Price of Vehicle License Plate with Deep Recurrent Neural Network,
Abstract: In Chinese societies, superstition is of paramount importance, and vehicle
license plates with desirable numbers can fetch very high prices in auctions.
Unlike other valuable items, license plates are not allocated an estimated
price before auction. I propose that the task of predicting plate prices can be
viewed as a natural language processing (NLP) task, as the value depends on the
meaning of each individual character on the plate and its semantics. I
construct a deep recurrent neural network (RNN) to predict the prices of
vehicle license plates in Hong Kong, based on the characters on a plate. I
demonstrate the importance of having a deep network and of retraining.
Evaluated on 13 years of historical auction prices, the deep RNN outperforms
previous models by a significant margin.