Attention-Based Residual Dilated Network for Traffic Accident Prediction

Abstract

Traffic accidents directly influence public safety and economic development; thus, the prevention of traffic accidents is of great importance in urban transportation. The accurate prediction of traffic accidents can assist traffic departments to better control and prevent accidents. Thus, this paper proposes a deep learning method named attention-based residual dilated network (ARDN), to extract essential information from multi-source datasets and enhance accident prediction accuracy. The method utilizes bidirectional long short-term memory to model sequential information and incorporates an attention mechanism to recalibrate weights. Furthermore, a dilated residual layer is adopted to capture long term information effectively. Feature encoding is also employed to incorporate natural language descriptions and point-of-interest data. Experimental evaluations of datasets collected from Austin and Houston demonstrate that ARDN outperforms a range of machine learning methods, such as logistic regression, gradient boosting, Xgboost, and deep learning methods. The ablation experiments further confirm the indispensability of each component in the proposed method.