RiskCast

Road traffic accidents are a major challenge in urban transportation systems. An effective countermeasure to address this problem is to accurately forecast the traffic risks in a city before accidents actually happen. Current traffic accident prediction solutions largely rely on accurate data collected from infrastructure-based sensors, which is not always available due to various resource constraints or privacy and legal concerns. In this paper, we address this limitation by exploring social sensing, a new sensing paradigm that uses humans as sensors to report the states of the physical world. In particular, we consider two types of publicly available social sensing data sources: social media data (e.g., traffic posts on Twitter) and open city data (e.g., traffic data from the city web portal). In this paper, we develop the RiskCast, an inductive multi-view learning approach to accurately forecast the traffic risk by exploiting the social sensing data under a principled co-regularization framework. The evaluation results on a real world dataset from New York City show that RiskCast significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in forecasting the traffic risks in a city.