The Impact of Battery Cell Configuration on Electric Vehicle Performance: An XGBoost-Based Classification with SHAP Interpretability
It addresses the need for better battery design in electric vehicles to optimize performance, but it is incremental as it applies existing machine learning methods to a specific domain problem.
This study tackled the problem of understanding the non-linear relationship between battery cell configuration and electric vehicle performance by developing an XGBoost classifier that categorized acceleration into High, Mid, and Low levels, achieving 87.5% predictive accuracy, 0.968 ROC-AUC, and 0.812 MCC.
As the electric vehicle (EV) market continues to prioritize dynamic performance and rapid charging, battery configuration has rapidly evolved. Despite this, current literature has often overlooked the complex, non-linear relationship between battery configuration and electric vehicle performance. To address this gap, this study proposes a machine learning framework which categorizes the EV acceleration performance into High (<= 4.0 seconds), Mid (4.0 - 7.0 seconds), and Low (> 7.0 seconds). Utilizing a preprocessed dataset consisting of 276 EV samples, an Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) classifier was utilized, achieving 87.5% predictive accuracy, a 0.968 ROC-AUC, and a 0.812 MCC. In order to ensure engineering transparency SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) were employed. Results of analysis shows that an increase in battery cell count initially boosts power delivery, but its mass and complexity diminished performance gains eventually. As such, these findings indicate that battery configuration in EVs must balance system complexity and architectural configuration in order to receive and retain optimal vehicle performance.