Classification of Parent Company's Downward Business Clients Using Random Forest: Focused on Value Chain at the Industry of Automobile Parts

Abstract

The value chain has been utilized as a strategic tool to improve competitive advantage, mainly at the enterprise level and at the industrial level. However, in order to conduct value chain analysis at the enterprise level, the client companies of the parent company should be classified according to whether they belong to it’s value chain. The establishment of a value chain for a single company can be performed smoothly by experts, but it takes a lot of cost and time to build one which consists of multiple companies. Thus, this study proposes a model that automatically classifies the companies that form a value chain based on actual transaction data. A total of 19 transaction attribute variables were extracted from the transaction data and processed into the form of input data for machine learning method. The proposed model was constructed using the Random Forest algorithm. The experiment was conducted on a automobile parts company. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model can classify the client companies of the parent company automatically with 92% of accuracy, 76% of F1-score and 94% of AUC. Also, the empirical study confirm that a few transaction attributes such as transaction concentration, transaction amount and total sales per customer are the main characteristics representing the companies that form a value chain.