title: An explanatory analysis of driver injury severity in rear-end crashes using a decision table/Naïve Bayes (DTNB) hybrid classifier.
abstract: Rear-end crashes are a major type of traffic crashes in the U.S. Of practical necessity is a comprehensive examination of its mechanism that results in injuries and fatalities. Decision table (DT) and Naïve Bayes (NB) methods have both been used widely but separately for solving classification problems in multiple areas except for traffic safety research. Based on a two-year rear-end crash dataset, this paper applies a decision table/Naïve Bayes (DTNB) hybrid classifier to select the deterministic attributes and predict driver injury outcomes in rear-end crashes. The test results show that the hybrid classifier performs reasonably well, which was indicated by several performance evaluation measurements, such as accuracy, F-measure, ROC, and AUC. Fifteen significant attributes were found to be significant in predicting driver injury severities, including weather, lighting conditions, road geometry characteristics, driver behavior information, etc. The extracted decision rules demonstrate that heavy vehicle involvement, a comfortable traffic environment, inferior lighting conditions, two-lane rural roadways, vehicle disabled damage, and two-vehicle crashes would increase the likelihood of drivers sustaining fatal injuries. The research limitations on data size, data structure, and result presentation are also summarized. The applied methodology and estimation results provide insights for developing effective countermeasures to alleviate rear-end crash injury severities and improve traffic system safety performance.
authors.affiliation: Department of Civil Engineering, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131, USA.
authors.forename: Cong
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: Department of Civil Engineering, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131, USA. Electronic address: guohui@unm.edu.
authors.forename: Guohui
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: School of Electronic Information and Control Engineering, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing 100124, China.
authors.forename: Jinfu
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.affiliation: Quality Assurance and Transportation System Safety, Washington State Department of Transportation, Seattle, WA 98101, USA.
authors.forename: John C
authors.initials: JC
authors.lastname: Milton
authors.affiliation: Geospatial and Population Studies Traffic Research Unit, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87106, USA.
authors.forename: Adélamar Dely
authors.initials: AD
authors.lastname: Alcántara
mesh_terms: D000063:Accidents, Traffic / Q000401:mortality / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D001499:Bayes Theorem; D003661:Decision Support Techniques; D004779:Environment Design; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008029:Lighting; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009516:New Mexico / Q000453:epidemiology; D011336:Probability; D011340:Problem Solving; D012424:Rural Population; D012622:Seat Belts / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D014481:United States; D014887:Weather; D014947:Wounds and Injuries / Q000453:epidemiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Decision rules; Decision table/Naïve Bayes (DTNB) classifier; Driver injury severity; ROC curve; Rear-end crash; Traffic safety