Lately, customers think highly of the emotional satisfaction and as a result, issues on odor are matters of concern. The cases are odor of interior material and air-conditioner of vehicles. In particualar, with respect to the odor of air-conditioner, customers strongly claimed defects with provocative comments : "It smells like something rotten," "It smells like a foot odor," "It stinks like a rag." Generally, it is known that mold of evaporator core in the air-conditioning system decays and this produce VOCs which causes the odor to occur. In this study, partial least squares regression model is applied to predict the strength of the odor and select of important VOCs which affect car air conditioning smell. The PLS method is basically a particular multilinear regression algorithm which can handle correlated inputs and limited data. The number of latent variable is determined by the point which is stabilized mean absolute deviations of VOCs data. Also multiple linear regression is carried out to confirm the validity of PLS method.
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