Automatic determination of traffic accidents based on KMC-based attribute weighting

Abstract

In this study, the traffic accidents recognizing risk factors related to the environmental (climatological) conditions that are associated with motor vehicles accidents on the Konya-Afyonkarahisar highway with the aid of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) have been determined using the combination of K-means clustering (KMC)-based attribute weighting (KMCAW) and classifier algorithms including artificial neural network (ANN) and adaptive network-based fuzzy inference system (ANFIS). The dynamic segmentation process in ArcGIS9.0 from the traffic accident reports recorded by District Traffic Agency has identified the locations of the motor vehicle accidents. The attributes obtained from this system are day, temperature, humidity, weather conditions, and month of occurred traffic accidents. The traffic accident dataset comprises five attributes (day, temperature, humidity, weather conditions, and month of occurred traffic accidents) and 358 observations including 179 without accident and 179 with accident. The proposed comprises two stages. In the first stage, the all attributes of dataset have been weighted using KMCAW method. The aims of this weighting method are both to increase the classification performance of used classifier algorithm and to transform from linearly non-separable traffic accidents dataset to a linearly separable dataset. In the second stage, after weighting process, ANN and ANFIS classifier algorithms have been separately used to determine the case of traffic accidents as with accident or without accident. In order to evaluate the performance of proposed method, the classification accuracy, sensitivity, specificity and area under the ROC (Receiver Operating Characteristic) curves (AUC) values have been used. While ANN and ANFIS classifiers obtained the overall prediction accuracies of 53.93 and 38.76%, respectively, the combination of KMCAW and ANN and the combination of KMCAW and ANFIS achieved the overall prediction accuracies of 74.15 and 55.06% on the prediction of traffic accidents. The experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed attribute weighting method called KMCAW is a robust and effective data pre-processing method in the prediction of traffic accidents on Konya-Afyonkarahisar highway in Turkey.