Crash severity analysis: A data-enhanced double layer stacking model using semantic understanding

Abstract

The crash severity analysis is of significant importance in traffic crash prevention and emergency resource allocation. A range of innovations offers potential traffic crash severity prediction models to improve road safety. However, the semantic information inherent in traffic crash data, which is crucial in enabling a deeper understanding of its underlying factors and impacts, has yet to be fully utilized. Moreover, traffic crash data are commonly characterized by a small sample size, which leads to sample imbalance problem resulting in prediction performance decline. To tackle these problems, we propose a semantic understanding-based data-enhanced double-layer stacking model, named EnLKtreeGBDT, for crash severity prediction. Specifically, to fully leverage the inherent semantic information within traffic crash data and analyze the factors influencing crashes, we design a semantic enhancement module for multi-dimensional feature extraction. This module aims to enhance the understanding of crash semantics and improve prediction accuracy. Then we introduce a data enhancement module that utilizes data denoising and migration techniques to address the challenge of data imbalance, reducing the prediction model's dependence on large sample crash data. Furthermore, we construct a two-layer stacking model that combines multiple linear and nonlinear classifiers. This model is designed to augment the capability of learning linear and nonlinear mixed relationships, thereby improving the accuracy of predicting the severity of crashes on complex urban roads. Experiments on historical datasets of UK road safety crashes validate the effectiveness of the proposed model, and superior performance of prediction precision is achieved compared with the state-of-the-arts. The ablation experiments on both semantic and data enhancement modules further confirm the indispensability of each module in the proposed model.