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What Property Tax Rate Will This City Charge?

From the state, the population, the median home value and household income, what's the effective property tax rate in this US city? Buyers comparing places want the number before they look at houses.

Use caseFinancePredictionModel evaluation

The table

10,058 US cities with state, population, median home value and median household income, and the effective property tax rate. It's in Welt's research catalogue as US Property Tax Rates 2026 by City, 10,058 rows by 10 columns, licensed CC BY 4.0. The catalogue measures its signal at 0.77. At 10,058 rows and 9 features the table is larger than the model limits allow, so the walkthrough evaluates and fits on a seeded sample of 8,000 rows. TabICLv2 and Kumo Tabular Medium compete.

Walkthrough

  1. Load it from the catalogue

    Find the table, read its recorded target and print the column names.

    import pandas as pd
    from welt import Client
    
    with Client() as client:
        item = client.research_datasets(q="US property tax rates 2026 by city", limit=1)["items"][0]
        info = client.research_dataset(item["id"])
        data = client.load_research_dataset(item["id"])
    
    target = info["targets"][0]
    target = target["name"] if isinstance(target, dict) else target
    print([column["name"] for column in info["schema"]], target)
  2. Pick the rows

    Set aside 20 rows to predict at the end. The models learn from a seeded sample of 8,000 of the rest, the most this table's width allows.

    known = data.dropna(subset=[target])
    new_rows = known.sample(20, random_state=1)
    table = known.drop(new_rows.index).sample(8000, random_state=7)
  3. Compare the models and predict

    The models compete on the same folds against a simple guess, then the top-ranked one is fitted on the whole table. RMSE and MAE are average errors in the target's own units, so lower is better. The last table puts each prediction next to the real answer.

    with Client() as client:
        evaluation = client.evaluate(table, target, task="regression", seed=7,
                                     models=["tabicl-v2", "kumo-medium"])
        model = evaluation.fit()
    
    print(evaluation.summary()[["name", "rank", "rmse_mean", "mae_mean"]])
    features = new_rows.drop(columns=target)
    print(pd.DataFrame({"actual": new_rows[target].values, "predicted": model.predict(features)}))

What you get

A rate per cityFor cities in the table and ones like them.
Unusual ratesCities far from the estimate stand out.
A strong signalThe catalogue measures a high signal.

Try it

Use Open with to run the research datasets notebook in Colab, Kaggle or Jupyter and search for "US property tax rates 2026 by city", or run the code above after pip install "welt-client[parquet]".