In a recent staff blog post, it was revealed that the Bank of England uses a “bipartite matching algorithm” to help understand the hoards of big data it has on the housing market.
The institution uses the algorithm to find out why, when and how people move house.
In order to do this, it created a matching algorithm to help identify the characteristics of the movers and the mortgages that many of them took out.
This was revealed in a recent blog post on Bank Underground, that explained: “The dataset identify whether a borrower is a first time buyer or a home-mover, together with other information.
“Even though we do not have information before 2005, we can still try to use this dataset to identify some of the owners’ moving patterns.
“We try to find from where a home-mover may have moved (origination point) and who moved in to his/her vacant property.
“If we can successfully track the movers, it will also help us to remove corresponding old mortgages to calculate the stock of mortgages from our flow data.”
To read more about the Bank of England algorithms, click here.