Mining Road Traffic Accident Data for Prediction of Accident Severity

As World Health Organization reports show more than 1.3 million people die each year from traffic accidents and more than twenty to fifty million people are harmed by non-fatal accidents. Understanding and identifying the major factors of road traffic accidents can help the stakeholders to take appropriate measures to minimize the accidents. Support Vector Machine (SVM), J48, and Naïve Bayes (NB) classification techniques are implemented to build a model that predicts accident severities and to identify road traffic accident factors. As experimental findings showed weather conditions, number of lanes, road lighting conditions, and speed limit are the determinant factors that cause more accident severity. Finally, the classification and prediction performance of the models are compared using various performance evaluation techniques. J48 classifier has better classification performance than Support Vector Machine and Naïve Bayes classifiers. Naïve Bayes is the classifier that showed the lowest performance than others, but it has good performance in classifying fatal accident severities rather than serious and slight accident severities.