Abstract
Traffic accidents have significant financial and social impacts. Reducing the losses caused by traffic accidents has always been one of the most important issues. This paper presents an effort to investigate the factors affecting the accident severity of drivers with different driving experience. Special focus was placed on the combined effect of driving experience and age. Based on our dataset (traffic accidents that occurred between 2005 and 2021 in Shaanxi, China), CatBoost model was applied to deal with categorical feature, and SHAP (Shapley Additive exPlanations) model was used to interpret the output. Results show that accident cause, age, visibility, light condition, season, road alignment, and terrain are the key factors affecting accident severity for both novice and experienced drivers. Age has the opposite impact on fatal accident for novice and experienced drivers. Novice drivers younger than 30 or older than 55 are prone to suffer fatal accident, but for experienced drivers, the risk of fatal accident decreases when they are young and increases when they are old. These findings fill the research gap of the combined effect of driving experience and age on accident severity. Meanwhile, it can provide useful insights for practitioners to improve traffic safety for novice and experienced drivers.
Highlights
Kun Xie and Xiaoxiang MaAccording to China Statistical Yearbook (2020), in 2019, there were 247,646 road traffic accidents in China, resulting in 62,763 deaths, 25,101 injuries, and direct property losses of1346.179 million CNY
The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 reviews the research on the traffic accident severity of drivers with different driving experience and related models
GridSearch methodperformance, is the common method for hyperparameters tuning in machine learning, but the disadvantage of this method is that it takes long time
Summary
According to China Statistical Yearbook (2020), in 2019, there were 247,646 road traffic accidents in China, resulting in 62,763 deaths, 25,101 injuries, and direct property losses of. It is necessary to investigate and analyze the influencing factors of accident severity for novice drivers and experienced drivers. Drivers are divided into three groups according to their driving experience, and the influencing factors of accident severity of different groups are comparatively studied. On this basis, the combined effect of age and driving experience is analyzed. The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 reviews the research on the traffic accident severity of drivers with different driving experience and related models. The innovation of our study is analyzing the combined influence of driving experience and age on traffic accident severity. The key questions to be addressed are: what are the major factors causing serious accident outcomes for drivers with different driving experience?
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