How to get best predictions for road monitoring using machine learning techniques

Abstract

Road condition monitoring is essential for improving traffic safety and reducing accidents. Machine learning methods have recently gained prominence in the practically important task of controlling road surface quality. Several systems have been proposed using sensors, especially accelerometers present in smartphones due to their availability and low cost. However, these methods require practitioners to specify an exact set of features from all the sensors to provide more accurate results, including the time, frequency, and wavelet-domain signal features. It is important to know the effect of these features change on machine learning model performance in handling road anomalies classification tasks. Thus, we address such a problem by conducting a sensitivity analysis of three machine learning models which are Support Vector Machine, Decision Tree, and Multi-Layer Perceptron to test the effectiveness of the model by selecting features. We built a feature vector from all three axes of the sensors that boosts classification performance. Our proposed approach achieved an overall accuracy of 94% on four types of road anomalies. To allow an objective analysis of different features, we used available accelerometer datasets. Our objective is to achieve a good classification performance of road anomalies by distinguishing between significant and relatively insignificant features. Our chosen baseline machine learning models are based on their comparative simplicity and powerful empirical performance. The extensive analysis results of our study provide practical advice for practitioners wishing to select features effectively in real-world settings for road anomalies detection.