title: Further notes on the application of zero-inflated models in highway safety.
abstract: The intent of this note is to succinctly articulate additional points that were not provided in the original paper (Lord et al., 2005) and to help clarify a collective reluctance to adopt zero-inflated (ZI) models for modeling highway safety data. A dialogue on this important issue, just one of many important safety modeling issues, is healthy discourse on the path towards improved safety modeling. This note first provides a summary of prior findings and conclusions of the original paper. It then presents two critical and relevant issues: the maximizing statistical fit fallacy and logic problems with the ZI model in highway safety modeling. Finally, we provide brief conclusions.
authors.affiliation: Zachry Department of Civil Engineering, TAMU3136, Texas A and M University, College Station, TX 77843-3136, USA. d-lord@tamu.edu
authors.forename: Dominique
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Lord
authors.forename: Simon
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Washington
authors.forename: John N
authors.initials: JN
authors.lastname: Ivan
mesh_terms: D000063:Accidents, Traffic / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D016010:Binomial Distribution; D006801:Humans; D016012:Poisson Distribution; D012044:Regression Analysis; D012449:Safety / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D014186:Transportation / Q000592:standards*