Engine sound comfortability: relevant sound quality parameters and classification

Abstract In order to be able to shorten the design cycle, automobile manufacturers are interested in modelling the human perception of engine sounds. In the first part of the paper the relevant Sound Quality parameters for the prediction of engine sound comfortability are determined. The inputs are ordered with Automatic Relevance Determination and the obtained ranking is verified on the data. In the second part, models are presented to classify and compare cars on comfortability. Least Squares Support Vector Machines (LS-SVMs) is used for the classification. The influence of selecting the relevant inputs on the model performance is illustrated.