Solution to data imbalance and complex interactions in traffic conflict modeling: a hypergraph and generative AI approach

Existing traffic conflict models face challenges in handling minority class samples and capturing dynamic interactions in complex traffic scenarios. These limitations hinder model generalization and real-world applicability. This study employs an enhanced Two-dimensional Time-to-collision (2D-TTC) metric combined with vehicle interaction relationships to predict traffic conflicts of multiple patterns. To address imbalance in conflict and non-conflict events, both undersampling and oversampling techniques are employed, while a generative adversarial network with self-attention layers is leveraged to overcome the shortcomings of oversampling methods. Indeed, this approach proved highly effective, elevating the model's F1-score from 76.35 % with undersampling alone to 94.21 %. Additionally, several machine learning and deep learning models are compared, with the hypergraph attention network combined with Shapley additive explanations (S-HGAT) demonstrating the strongest learning capability. Furthermore, vehicle speed is identified as the most influential factor associated with traffic conflicts. A comprehensive re-evaluation of feature combinations reveals that the top six features-vehicle speed, the number of vehicles ahead, the standard deviation and the average of vehicle speeds within the traffic flow, distance with the road markings, and peak traffic hour indicators-result in the highest model F1-score of 98.41 % and accuracy of 97.66 %. Finally, the real-world implications of these findings are discussed.