Abstract
Vulnerable road users (VRUs) represent a large portion of fatalities and injuries occurring on European Union roads. It is therefore important to address the safety of VRUs, particularly in urban areas, by identifying which factors may affect the injury severity level that can be used to develop countermeasures. This paper aims to identify the risk factors that affect the severity of a VRU injured when involved in a motor vehicle crash. For that purpose, a comparative evaluation of two machine learning classifiers—decision tree and logistic regression—considering three different resampling techniques (under-, over- and synthetic oversampling) is presented, comparing both imbalanced and balanced datasets. Crash data records were analyzed involving VRUs from three different cities in Portugal and six years (2012–2017). The main conclusion that can be drawn from this study is that oversampling techniques improve the ability of the classifiers to identify risk factors. On the one hand, this analysis revealed that road markings, road conditions and luminosity affect the injury severity of a pedestrian. On the other hand, age group and temporal variables (month, weekday and time period) showed to be relevant to predict the severity of a cyclist injury when involved in a crash.
Highlights
Road crashes are among the leading causes of death, disability, property loss and yield costs to society, representing 1–3% of GDP worldwide [1]
To evaluate the most efficient prediction model based on three resampling techniques; To explore and compare the results of two supervised classification techniques in order to identify which variables can significantly affect pedestrian and cyclist injury severity when involved in a motor vehicle crash
The three resampling techniques were applied to the datasets, resulting in six different datasets
Summary
Road crashes are among the leading causes of death, disability, property loss and yield costs to society, representing 1–3% of GDP worldwide [1]. More than one million people lose their lives every year in road crashes and 20 to 50 million people are injured [1]. Pedestrians and cyclists are vulnerable road users (VRUs) since they are unprotected and they represent the majority of people killed and injured on the European Union (EU) roads [2]. Despite long-term trends in reducing death and injury rates, in 2017, 21% of fatalities on European Union roads were pedestrians and 8% were cyclists, decreasing at a lower rate than other fatalities [3]. For Portugal, in 2017, the percentage of VRU fatalities were 25% of the total (21% being pedestrians and 4% being cyclists) [4].
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