Decision Tree Ensemble Method for Analyzing Traffic Accidents of Novice Drivers in Urban Areas.

Alfonso Montella,Carlos Mantas,Joaquín Abellán,Javier Castellano,Serafín Moral-García

doi:10.3390/e21040360

Alfonso Montella, Carlos Mantas + Show 3 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/e21040360

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Abstract

Presently, there is a critical need to analyze traffic accidents in order to mitigate their terrible economic and human impact. Most accidents occur in urban areas. Furthermore, driving experience has an important effect on accident analysis, since inexperienced drivers are more likely to suffer fatal injuries. This work studies the injury severity produced by accidents that involve inexperienced drivers in urban areas. The analysis was based on data provided by the Spanish General Traffic Directorate. The information root node variation (IRNV) method (based on decision trees) was used to get a rule set that provides useful information about the most probable causes of fatalities in accidents involving inexperienced drivers in urban areas. This may prove useful knowledge in preventing this kind of accidents and/or mitigating their consequences.

Highlights

An estimated 1.27 million people die and 20–50 million people are injured in traffic accidents every year [1], with a devastating human and economic impact
For each dataset, a Decision trees (DTs) was applied for each variable and each split criterion
With other works in the literature, such as References [5,6,26], we built the DTs with only four levels to get rules which could be useful, simple and easy to understand for road safety analysts

Summary

Introduction

An estimated 1.27 million people die and 20–50 million people are injured in traffic accidents every year [1], with a devastating human and economic impact. For this reason, it is fundamental to analyze the main causes of the serious severity in traffic accidents to avoid fatal injuries. According to Reference [2], many accidents occur in urban areas. According to Reference [3], the factors that affect road accident severity in urban and non-urban areas are different. Other works [5,6] are focused on accidents that did not occur in intersections, remarking this point

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