Used Car Pricing and Beyond: A Survival Analysis Framework

Abstract

A significant part of the overall automotive market is derived from the used car trade. Determining correctly the used car market values will certainly help achieving fairer trade in many economies. By using the web listings as a proxy data source, we can create some models for the used car pricing based on the asking prices listed in the web adverts. This type of data acquisition requires a thorough data cleaning process to generate dependable statistical models after all. This paper proposes a survival analysis based approach to study the lifetime of the used car listings that can be found at web sites like Craigslist. Pricing models can be easily built to determine the market values of the used-cars from this type of data. One of the most important assumptions in our approach is to consider the delisting of an advert as a sale event. This is also equivalent to the death in the survival analysis context. Since the collected data have labels in terms of sale or not, we can utilize the predictive models to determine whether a particular car at a certain price will be successfully sold or not.