Cause Analysis and Accident Classification of Road Traffic Accidents Based on Complex Networks

Abstract

The number of motor vehicles on the road is constantly increasing, leading to a rise in the number of traffic accidents. Accurately identifying the factors contributing to these accidents is a crucial topic in the field of traffic accident research. Most current research focuses on analyzing the causes of traffic accidents rather than investigating the underlying factors. This study creates a complex network for road traffic accident cause analysis using the topology method for complex networks. The network metrics are analyzed using the network parameters to obtain reduced dimensionality feature factors, and four machine learning techniques are applied to accurately classify the accidents’ severity based on the analysis results. The study divides real traffic accident data into three main categories based on the factors that influences them: time, environment, and traffic management. The results show that traffic management factors have the most significant impact on road accidents. The study also finds that Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) outperforms Logistic Regression (LR), Random Forest (RF) and Decision Tree (DT) in accurately categorizing the severity of traffic accidents.