A Deep Learning Approach to Predict Severity Levels of Work Zone Crashes

The need for maintaining aging infrastructure and /or expanding road capacity lead s to an increasing number of work zones presented on highways. Consequently, many crashes were observed in work zone areas. In order to help transportation agencies select more appropriate countermeasures to reduce crash risk in work zones, more comprehensive studies on work zone crash occurrences and the corresponding outcomes are needed. Existing research mainly sought to use parametric models such as logistic regression to examine the causal relationship between potential contributing risk factors and accordingly work zone crash severity. However, the predictive performance s of the deployed models have been rarely examined. This paper introduces a non-parametric model building upon deep learning approach to predict the severity levels of work zone crashes. A numerical study that uses massive work zone crash data obtained from a State crash database was conducted to test the predictive capability of the proposed approach. Compared with two baseline approaches, logistic regression and support vector machine, the proposed method achieved improved performance. Key findings, recommendations, and the sensitivity analysis are also provided that can help users consider suitable parameters when using the proposed approach to predict the severity of work zone crashes.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ABJ70 Standing Committee on Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Computing Applications.
• Authors:
  • Yang, Hong
  • Wang, Zhenyu
  • Xie, Kun
  • Ma, Yifang
  • Zhu, Yuan
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 97th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2018-1-7 to 2018-1-11
• Date: 2018

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Pagination: 2p

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Countermeasures; Crash causes; Crash characteristics; Crash risk forecasting; Crash severity; Learning; Mathematical prediction; Work zone safety
• Subject Areas: Highways; Safety and Human Factors;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01658999
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 18-03042
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Feb 5 2018 11:26AM