Pattern recognition of urban traffic accidents: Application of cluster analysis and support vector machine in accident pattern recognition

Abstract

Urban traffic accidents impose a significant threat to public safety because of its frequent occurrence and potential for severe injuries and fatalities. Hence, an effective analysis of accident patterns is crucial for designing accident prevention strategies. Recent advancement in data analytics have provided opportunities to improve the pattern of urban traffic accidents. However, the existing works face several challenges in adapting the complex dynamics, and heterogeneity of the accident data. To overcome these challenges, we proposed an innovative solution by combining the K-means clustering and Support Vector Machine to precisely predict the traffic accident patterns. By leveraging the efficiencies of clustering technique and machine learning, this work intends to identify the intricate patterns within the traffic database. Initially, a traffic accident database was collected and fed into the system. The collected database was pre-processed to improve and standardize the raw dataset. Further, cluster analysis is employed to identify distinct patterns within the dataset and group similar accidents into clusters. This clustering enables the system to recognize common accident scenarios and identify recent accident trends. Subsequently, a Support Vector Machine is deployed to classify accidents into distinct categories through intensive training with identified clusters. The combination enables the system to understand the complex relationships among diverse accident variables, making it an effective framework for real-time pattern recognition. The proposed strategy is implemented in Python and validated using the publicly available traffic accident database. The experimental results manifest that the proposed method achieved 99.65% accuracy, 99.53% precision, 99.62% recall, and 99.57% f-measure. Finally, the comparison with the existing techniques shows that the developed strategy offers improved accuracy, precision, recall, and f-measure compared to existing ones. shows that the developed strategy offers improved accuracy, precision, recall, and f-measure compared to existing ones.