Strategic planning support for road safety measures based on accident data mining

Abstract

When actions and measures to increase road safety are to be planned by the police and local authorities, it is necessary to consider the specific accident circumstances as well as their historical, current, and predicted course. In particular, combinations of accident circumstances not contained in existing police statistics are often neglected, but may nevertheless be relevant, e. g., due to an increasing frequency. In order to identify these undiscovered interesting combinations, we propose a framework to support strategic planning of road safety measures based on several consecutive data mining stages. The scope, type, and location of road safety measures must be planned at a strategic level several months in advance to be fully effective. Therefore, it is essential to investigate and predict the accident circumstances and the temporal changes in their frequency comprehensively. Only with the knowledge, e. g., about the temporal pattern, locations, conditions of roads or speeds, meaningful actions can be derived. The embedded data mining approaches, i. e., frequent itemset mining, time series clustering, time series classification, forecasting, and scoring, are carefully selected, coordinated, and aligned. As a result, the framework provides police users with information about circumstances of accidents that are of interest in the future and presents their previous temporal and local patterns in a dashboard. In this study, the framework is applied in four different geographical regions. Thereby, default parameter settings for all approaches are found that are particularly suitable for the framework to investigate novel geographic regions.