An Incident Detection Model Using Random Forest Classifier

Traffic incidents have adverse effects on traffic operations, safety, and the economy. Efficient Automatic Incident Detection (AID) systems are crucial for timely and accurate incident detection. This paper develops a realistic AID model using the Random Forest (RF), which is a machine learning technique. The model is trained and tested on simulated data from VISSIM traffic simulation software. The model considers the variations in four critical factors: congestion levels, incident severity, incident location, and detector distance. Comparative evaluation with existing AID models, in the literature, demonstrates the superiority of the developed model, exhibiting higher Detection Rate (DR), lower Mean Time to Detect (MTTD), and lower False Alarm Rate (FAR). During training, the RF model achieved a DR of 96.97%, MTTD of 1.05 min, and FAR of 0.62%. During testing, it achieved a DR of 100%, MTTD of 1.17 min, and FAR of 0.862%. Findings indicate that detecting minor incidents during low traffic volumes is challenging. FAR decreases with the increase in Demand to Capacity ratio (D/C), while MTTD increases with D/C. Higher incident severity leads to lower MTTD values, while greater distance between an incident and upstream detector has the opposite effect. The FAR is inversely proportional to the incident’s location from the upstream detector, while being directly proportional to the distance between detectors. Larger detector spacings result in longer detection times.