Comparing detection and disclosure of traffic incidents in social networks: an intelligent approach based on Twitter vs. Waze

Nowadays, social networks have become  in a  communication  medium widely  used to disseminate any type  of  information. In  particular,  the  shared  information  in  social  networks  usually  includes  a  considerable number of traffic incidents reports of specific cities. In light of this, specialized social networks have emerged for detecting and disseminating traffic incidents, differentiating from generic social networks in which a wide variety of  topics  are  communicated.  In this  context,  Twitter  is  a  case  in  point  of  a  generic  social  network  in  which  its users often share information about traffic incidents, while Waze is a social network specialized in traffic. In this paper we present a comparative study between Waze and an intelligent approach that detects traffic incidents by analyzing publications shared in Twitter. The comparative study was carried out considering Ciudad Autonoma de Buenos  Aires  (CABA),  Argentina,  as  the  region  of  interest.  The results of this work suggest that both social networks should be considered as complementary sources of information. This conclusion is based on the fact that the proportion of mutual detections, i.e. traffic incidents detected by both approaches, was considerably low since it did not exceed 6% of the cases. Moreover, the results do not show that any of the approaches tend to anticipate in time to the other one in the detection of traffic incidents.