title: Analysis of traffic accident injury severity on Spanish rural highways using Bayesian networks.
abstract: Several different factors contribute to injury severity in traffic accidents, such as driver characteristics, highway characteristics, vehicle characteristics, accidents characteristics, and atmospheric factors. This paper shows the possibility of using Bayesian Networks (BNs) to classify traffic accidents according to their injury severity. BNs are capable of making predictions without the need for pre assumptions and are used to make graphic representations of complex systems with interrelated components. This paper presents an analysis of 1536 accidents on rural highways in Spain, where 18 variables representing the aforementioned contributing factors were used to build 3 different BNs that classified the severity of accidents into slightly injured and killed or severely injured. The variables that best identify the factors that are associated with a killed or seriously injured accident (accident type, driver age, lighting and number of injuries) were identified by inference.
authors.affiliation: TRYSE Research Group, Department of Civil Engineering, University of Granada, ETSI Caminos, Canales y Puertos, c/Severo Ochoa, s/n, 18071 Granada, Spain. jdona@ugr.es
authors.forename: Juan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: de Oña
authors.forename: Randa Oqab
authors.initials: RO
authors.lastname: Mujalli
authors.forename: Francisco J
authors.initials: FJ
authors.lastname: Calvo
mesh_terms: D000063:Accidents, Traffic / Q000401:mortality / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D001499:Bayes Theorem; D015984:Causality; D005103:Expert Systems; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D015601:Injury Severity Score; D016013:Likelihood Functions; D008297:Male; D012424:Rural Population / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D012737:Sex Factors; D013030:Spain; D014947:Wounds and Injuries / Q000453:epidemiology* / Q000401:mortality; D055815:Young Adult