Nonlinear overall annoyance level modeling and interior sound quality prediction for pure electric vehicle with extreme gradient boosting algorithm

Abstract

A single psychoacoustic metric cannot reflect pure electric vehicle (PEV) interior overall sound quality (SQ) accurately. There exists a complex nonlinear mapping relationship between psychoacoustic indexes and SQ prediction. In this work, a nonlinear overall annoyance level modeling method using the extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) algorithm is proposed. Firstly, comprehensive noise samples inside the cabins of PEV and conventional fuel vehicle (FV) at high speed are collected. Subjective and objective SQ evaluations are conducted for FV and PEV interior noise, respectively. Their differences are analyzed by comparison. The correlation among various SQ indexes is studied, revealing a significant multicollinearity disruption. Then, the relative importance ranking is determined by the random forests algorithm, which provides a basis for feature index selection. Finally, the XGBoost-based nonlinear overall annoyance level model for SQ evaluation is established. Using the XGBoost-based model, traditional multiple linear regression (MLR) model, and linear least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) model, PEV SQ is predicted. The results show that the XGBoost-based model exhibits high prediction accuracy, improving 75.6% relative to the MLR model and 74.9% relative to the LASSO model. Meanwhile, it has excellent stability and goodness-of-fitting. Thus, it provides an alternative method for PEV SQ evaluation and prediction.