SearcharxivSearch

arXiv · 2310.05840

Predicting Accident Severity: An Analysis Of Factors Affecting Accident Severity Using Random Forest Model

Abstract

Road accidents have significant economic and societal costs, with a small number of severe accidents accounting for a large portion of these costs. Predicting accident severity can help in the proactive approach to road safety by identifying potential unsafe road conditions and taking well-informed actions to reduce the number of severe accidents. This study investigates the effectiveness of the Random Forest machine learning algorithm for predicting the severity of an accident. The model is trained on a dataset of accident records from a large metropolitan area and evaluated using various metrics. Hyperparameters and feature selection are optimized to improve the model's performance. The results show that the Random Forest model is an effective tool for predicting accident severity with an accuracy of over 80%. The study also identifies the top six most important variables in the model, which include wind speed, pressure, humidity, visibility, clear conditions, and cloud cover. The fitted model has an Area Under the Curve of 80%, a recall of 79.2%, a precision of 97.1%, and an F1 score of 87.3%. These results suggest that the proposed model has higher performance in explaining the target variable, which is the accident severity class. Overall, the study provides evidence that the Random Forest model is a viable and reliable tool for predicting accident severity and can be used to help reduce the number of fatalities and injuries due to road accidents in the United States

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

BibTeXRIS

Adekunle Adefabi, Somtobe Olisah, Callistus Obunadike, Oluwatosin Oyetubo, Esther Taiwo, Edward Tella. 2023-10-09. Predicting Accident Severity: An Analysis Of Factors Affecting Accident Severity Using Random Forest Model. https://doi.org/10.5121/ijci.2023.120609

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

AUC Maximization from Biased Positive-unlabeled Data with Confidence

Maximizing the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) is a standard approach to imbalanced binary classification. Although positive and negative data are required for maximizing the AUC, negative data are often difficult to collect in some real-world applications due to privacy concerns or the need for specialized expertise to annotate them. Thus, AUC maximization from positive and unlabeled (PU) data has been attracting attention. Existing methods assume that labeled positive data are unbiased samples from the true positive distribution. However, this ideal assumption is often violated in practice. In this paper, we propose a method to maximize the AUC from biased PU data. To address the bias, our key idea is to exploit {\it confidence}, i.e., the probability that an instance is positive, associated with the small number of labeled positive data. We derive an estimator of the AUC risk using biased PU data with confidence, enabling AUC maximization under such bias. We further show that the rewritten AUC risk induces a Bayes-optimal AUC ranking even when the available confidence is any strictly increasing transformation of the true posterior probability. We experimentally show the effectiveness of our method on eight real-world datasets.

cs.LG

Measuring the Value of World-Model Updates: A Counterfactual Utility Protocol for Continual Adaptation

Continual world models must decide whether new data justify changing the model. Fixed replay schedules and prediction-error triggers specify when to update, but neither reveals the value of an individual update: one deployment run cannot show how the same model would have performed at that moment had it held its parameters. We introduce the fork ledger, which branches a deployment stream at pre-registered decision points into matched update and hold continuations under common random numbers. It evaluates both continuations on the same episodes and records $\Delta R = R_{\mathrm{update}} - R_{\mathrm{hold}}$. Always applying one fixed update mechanism lowers return on all three simulated control tasks: CartPole ($-144.0$; checkpoint-bootstrap $95\%$ CI $[-185.4,-116.1]$, against a converged return near $650$), Walker ($-82.8$; $[-101.1,-61.7]$) and Cheetah ($-18.6$; $[-29.0,-6.6]$). Divergence is an outcome of applying the update, so the estimand counts every attempted fork; restricted to the $693$ of $720$ that did not collapse, CartPole and Walker are unchanged in sign ($-113.4$ and $-82.1$) and Cheetah becomes unresolved ($-3.9$; $[-17.5,+13.0]$). The task is the unit of inference: each contributes $240$ attempted forks over five pretrained checkpoints crossed with two drift directions. The ledger makes counterfactual utility observable for a fixed mechanism, allowing triggers to be judged by the updates they select rather than by surprise detection alone.

cs.LG

When More Is Not Better: Component Anti-Synergy in a P300 Speller

P300 brain-computer interface (BCI) spellers can provide hands-free communication for people with severe motor impairments. Modern pipelines combine multiple individually promising components, often assuming that 'more-is-better'. We tested this assumption using a four-component full-factorial experiment varying the inclusion of Euclidean Alignment (EA), xDAWN spatial filtering, subject calibration, and language model priors on a public P300 dataset. Performance was evaluated using accuracy, repetitions, and information transfer rate (ITR) with mixed-effects models. Results show that the value of components is conditional rather than additive. Calibration was the strongest singular contributor, while EA compensated for its absence in zero-calibration settings. Adding independently useful components could also reduce performance, revealing component anti-synergy. Contrary to conventional wisdom, LM support was not universally beneficial: its effect depends strongly on the strength of the underlying EEG pipeline, while results from a larger LM showed a similar pattern. Together, these findings challenge maximal 'all-on' pipeline design and highlight the value of selecting spatial and language-support components according to the quality of available EEG evidence.

cs.LG