Developing Crash Severity Model Handling Class Imbalance and Implementing Ordered Nature: Focusing on Elderly Drivers

Seunghoon Kim, Youngbin Lym and Ki-Jung Kim
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Seunghoon Kim: City and Regional Planning, Knowlton School, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA
Youngbin Lym: City and Regional Planning, Knowlton School, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA
Ki-Jung Kim: Department of Smart Car Engineering, Doowon Technical University, Paju 10838, Korea

IJERPH, 2021, vol. 18, issue 4, 1-23

Abstract: Along with the rapid demographic change, there has been increased attention to the risk of vehicle crashes relative to older drivers. Due to senior involvement and their physical vulnerability, it is crucial to develop models that accurately predict the severity of senior-involved crashes. However, the challenge is how to cope with an imbalanced severity class distribution and the ordered nature of crash severities, as these can complicate the classification of the severity of crashes. In that regard, this study investigates the influence of implementing ordinal nature and handling imbalanced class distribution on the prediction performance. Using vehicle crash data in Ohio, U.S., as an example, the eight machine learning classifiers (logistic and ordered logistic regressions and random forest and ordered random forest with or without handling imbalanced classes) are suggested and then compared with their respective performances. The analysis outcomes show that balancing strategy enhances performance in predicting severe crashes. In contrast, the effects of implementing ordinal nature vary across models. Specifically, the ordered random forest classifier without balancing appears to be superior in terms of overall prediction accuracy, and the ordered random forest with balancing outperforms others in predicting severer crashes.

Keywords: older drivers; machine learning; cost-sensitive learning; ordered nature; crash severity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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