GAN-Based Generation of Synthetic Data for Vehicle Driving Events

Developing solutions to reduce traffic accidents requires experimentation and much data. However, due to confidentiality issues, not all datasets used in previous research are publicly available, and those that are available may be insufficient for research. Building datasets with real data is costly. Given this reality, this paper proposes a procedure to generate synthetic data sequences of driving events using the Time series GAN (TimeGAN) and Real-world time series (RTSGAN) frameworks. First, a 15-feature driving event dataset is constructed with real data, which forms the basis for generating datasets using the two mentioned frameworks. The generated datasets are evaluated using the qualitative metrics PCA and T-SNE, as well as the discriminative and predictive score quantitative metrics defined in TimeGAN. The generated synthetic data are then used in an unsupervised algorithm to identify clusters representing vehicle crash risk levels. Next, the generated data are used in a supervised classification algorithm to predict risk level categories. Comparison results between the data generated by TimeGAN and RTSGAN show that the data generated by RTSGAN achieve better scores than the the data generated with TimeGAN. On the other hand, we demonstrate that the use of datasets trained with synthetic data to train a supervised classification model for predicting the level of accident risk can obtain accuracy comparable to that of models that use datasets with only real data in their training, proving the usefulness of the generated data.