Identifying Temporal Aggregation Effect on Crash-Frequency Modeling

Bumjoon Bae, Changju Lee, Tae-Young Pak and Sunghoon Lee
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Bumjoon Bae: Center for Privately-Financed Highway Studies, The Korea Transport Institute, Sejong 30147, Korea
Changju Lee: Environment, Planning and Economic Division, Virginia Transportation Research Council, Charlottesville, VA 22904, USA
Sunghoon Lee: Business Data Analytics Team, Samsung Card Co., Ltd., Seoul 04514, Korea

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 11, 1-10

Abstract: Aggregation of spatiotemporal data can encounter potential information loss or distort attributes via individual observation, which would influence modeling results and lead to an erroneous inference, named the ecological fallacy. Therefore, deciding spatial and temporal resolution is a fundamental consideration in a spatiotemporal analysis. The modifiable temporal unit problem (MTUP) occurs when using data that is temporally aggregated. While consideration of the spatial dimension has been increasingly studied, the counterpart, a temporal unit, is rarely considered, particularly in the traffic safety modeling field. The purpose of this research is to identify the MTUP effect in crash-frequency modeling using data with various temporal scales. A sensitivity analysis framework is adopted with four negative binomial regression models and four random effect negative binomial models having yearly, quarterly, monthly, and weekly temporal units. As the different temporal unit was applied, the result of the model estimation also changed in terms of the mean and significance of the parameter estimates. Increasing temporal correlation due to using the small temporal unit can be handled with the random effect models.

Keywords: modifiable temporal unit problem (MTUP); crash-frequency modeling; traffic safety; negative binomial regression (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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