Analysis of Roadway Fatal Accidents using Ensemble-based Meta-Classifiers

Abstract

In the past decades, a lot of effort has been put into roadway traffic safety. With the help of data mining, the analysis of roadway traffic data is much needed to understand the factors related to fatal accidents. This paper analyses Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) dataset using several data mining algorithms. Here, we compare the performance of four meta-classifiers and four data-oriented techniques known for their ability to handle imbalanced datasets, entirely based on Random Forest classifier. Also, we study the effect of applying several feature selection algorithms including PSO, Cuckoo, Bat and Tabu on improving the accuracy and efficiency of classification. The empirical results show that the Threshold selector meta-classifier combined with over-sampling techniques results were very satisfactory. In this regard, the proposed technique has gained a mean overall Accuracy of 91% and a Balanced Accuracy that varies between 96% to 99% using 7-15 features instead of 50 original features.