Research on sales strategies for target customers of electric vehicles based on gradient boosting ensemble trees

Abstract

This paper focuses on the automotive industry, especially the new energy vehicle sector, which is vital for the economy and needs careful market sales decisions. It analyzes data from 1,964 potential customers, including their satisfaction and personal information. The study uses machine learning to create a math model and give sales advice. The data is first cleaned without changing its original structure, and then normalized using the Z-Score method. For any outlier values in the data, the mean of similar items is used to fill in gaps. Specifically, for 500 missing entries about the number of children (B7), the paper groups customers by age, calculates the frequency of children in each group, and uses these frequencies to fill in missing values.Using the cleaned data, the XGBoost algorithm ranks the factors influencing customer decisions. For Brand 1, the top factors are economy (a3), work experience (B10), and safety performance (a4). For Brand 2, comfort (a2), disposable income (B15), and mortgage expenses (B16) are key. For Brand 3, car loan expenses (B17), battery technology (a1), and again mortgage expenses (B16) are most important.The paper also addresses imbalanced data by using an XGBoost binary classification model. This model predicts the likelihood of buying an electric vehicle using the Sigmoid function on tree node weights. It evaluates the model using Precision, Recall, and Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUC), which works well even with imbalanced data. The Precision and Recall rates for all three brands are above 90%, with AUC over 85% for Brands 1 and 2, and over 75% for Brand 3. This shows that the model is effective and can be used in real-world situations.