RentShield Canada AI Platform

🚀 An integrated AI decision-support system that combines rental search, risk detection, housing stress prediction, and renter guidance for the Canadian housing market.

RentShield Canada brings together statistical analysis, machine learning, deep learning (Transformer-based NLP), generative AI, and agentic workflows into a unified pipeline to support safer and smarter renting decisions.

Project 7 — Integrative Industry Synthesis

Overview

RentShield Canada integrates multiple AI components into a single system designed to assist renters in evaluating listings, identifying risks, understanding affordability pressure, and making informed decisions.

The system enables users to:

• Search rental listings
• Detect potential risk signals in listing descriptions
• Understand housing stress (affordability pressure)
• Receive clear, explainable renter guidance

This project focuses on system integration, explainability, and responsible AI design.

Integrated Capstone Projects

This system combines methods and insights from prior capstone work:

• Project 2 — Statistical housing market context
• Project 3 — Housing stress prediction (Machine Learning)
• Project 4 — Rental listing risk detection (Transformer-based NLP)
• Project 5 — Generative renter guidance
• Project 6 — Agentic search and orchestration

System Workflow

1. User submits a rental request (city, budget, housing type)
2. Agent extracts user preferences
3. Listings are retrieved (reproducible dataset or live data feed)
4. Listings are filtered based on preferences
5. Housing stress is estimated
6. Risk signals are detected from listing text
7. Renter guidance is generated
8. Listings are ranked and returned

Key Features

• Modular architecture (data, agent, scoring, and UI modules)
• Integrated AI pipeline combining statistical, ML, NLP, and generative methods
• Transparent outputs (risk level, stress level, and guidance explanations)
• Hybrid operation (reproducible evaluation + live rental data integration)

Data Sources

• Toronto Kijiji Rental Dataset (Project 4)
• Optional live rental listings via Apify Kijiji scraper (Project 6)

How to Run

bash pip install -r requirements.txt

Run the notebook: Project7_Integrative_Industry_Synthesis.ipynb

Notes

• Sample dataset is used for reproducible evaluation
• Live rental tool is available for demonstration
• This system is for educational and decision-support purposes only

Author

Alem Mekru
MSc in Artificial Intelligence Capstone