Analysis of Roadway Traffic Accidents Based on Rough Sets and Bayesian Networks

Abstract

The paper integrates Rough Sets (RS) and Bayesian Networks (BN) for roadway traffic accident analysis. RS reduction of attributes is first employed to generate the key set of attributes affecting accident outcomes, which are then fed into a BN structure as nodes for BN construction and accident outcome classification. Such RS-based BN framework combines the advantages of RS in knowledge reduction capability and BN in describing interrelationships among different attributes. The framework is demonstrated using the 100-car naturalistic driving data from Virginia Tech Transportation Institute to predict accident type. Comparative evaluation with the baseline BNs shows the RS-based BNs generally have a higher prediction accuracy and lower network complexity while with comparable prediction coverage and receiver operating characteristic curve area, proving that the proposed RS-based BN overall outperforms the BNs with/without traditional feature selection approaches. The proposed RS-based BN indicates the most significant attributes that affect accident types include pre-crash manoeuvre, driver’s attention from forward roadway to centre mirror, number of secondary tasks undertaken, traffic density, and relation to junction, most of which feature pre-crash driver states and driver behaviours that have not been extensively researched in literature, and could give further insight into the nature of traffic accidents.