Predicting the Price of Second-hand Cars using Artificial Neural Networks

The number of cars on Mauritian roads has been rising consistently by 5% during the last decade. In 2014, 173 954 cars were registered at the National Transport Authority. Thus, one Mauritian in every six owns a car, most of which are second hand reconditioned cars and used cars. The aim of this study is to assess whether it is possible to predict the price of second-hand cars using artificial neural networks. Thus, data for 200 cars from different sources was gathered and fed to four different machine learning algorithms. We found that support vector machine regression produced slightly better results than using a neural network or linear regression. However, some of the predicted values are quite far away from the actual prices, especially for higher priced cars. Thus, more investigations with a larger data set are required and more experimentation with different network type and structures is still required in order to obtain better predictions.