Road-traffic accident prediction model : Predicting the Number of Casualties

Abstract: Efficient and effective road traffic prediction and management techniques are crucial in intelligent transportation systems. It can positively influence road advancement, safety enhancement, regulation formulation, and route planning to save living things in advance from road traffic accidents. This thesis considers road safety by predicting the number of casualties if an accident occurs using multiple traffic accident attributes. It helps individuals (drivers) or traffic offices to adjust and control their contributions for the occurrence of an accident before emerging it. Three candidate algorithms from different regression fit patterns are proposed and evaluated to conduct the thesis: the bagging, linear, and non-linear fitting patterns. The gradient boosting machines (GBoost) from the bagging, Linearsupport vector regression (LinearSVR) from the linear, and extreme learning machines (ELM) also from the non-linear side are the selected algorithms. RMSE and MAE performance evaluation metrics are applied to evaluate the models. The GBoost achieved a better performance than the other two with a low error rate and minimum prediction interval value for 95% prediction interval. A SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) interpretation technique is applied to interpret each model at the global interpretation level using SHAP’s beeswarm plots. Finally, suggestions for future improvements are presented via the dataset and hyperparameter tuning.