Analysis of run-off-road accidents by association rule mining and geographic information system techniques on imbalanced datasets

Abstract

Run-off-road (ROR) accidents cause a large proportion of fatalities on roads. Exploring key factors is an effective method to reduce fatalities and improve safety sustainability. However, some limitations exist in current studies: (1) Datasets of ROR accidents have imbalance problems, in which the samples of fatal accidents (FA) are much less than non-fatal accidents (NFA). Data mining methods on such imbalanced datasets make the results biased. (2) Few studies conducted spatial analysis of ROR accidents in visualization. Therefore, this study proposes an association rule mining (ARM)-based framework to analyze ROR accidents on imbalanced datasets. A novel method is proposed to address the imbalance problem and ARM is applied to analyze accident severity. Geographic information system (GIS) is adopted for spatial analysis of ROR accidents. The proposed framework is applied to ROR accidents in Victoria, Australia. Six FA factors and seven NFA factors are identified from two-item rules. The results of three-item rules indicate factors acting interactively increase the likelihood of FA or NFA. Hot spots of ROR accidents are presented by GIS maps. Effective measures are accordingly proposed to improve road safety. Compared with traditional data-balancing methods, the proposed framework has been validated to provide more robust and reliable results on imbalanced datasets.