Classification model for product form design using fuzzy support vector machines

Consumer preferences regarding product design are often affected by a large variety of form features. Traditionally, the quality of product form design depended heavily on designers' intuitions and did not always prove to be successful in the marketplace. In this study, to help product designers develop appealing products in a more effective manner, an approach based on fuzzy support vector machines (fuzzy SVM) is proposed. This constructs a classification model of product form design based on consumer preferences. The one-versus-one (OVO) method is adopted to handle a multiclass problem by breaking it into various two-class problems. Product samples were collected and their form features were systematically examined. To formulate a classification problem, each product sample was assigned a class label and a fuzzy membership that corresponded to this label. The OVO fuzzy SVM model was constructed using collected product samples. The optimal training parameter set for the model was determined by a two-step cross-validation. A case study of mobile phone design is given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology. The performance of fuzzy SVM is also compared with SVM. The results of the experiment show that fuzzy SVM performed better than SVM. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.