Traffic Accident Severity Prediction Based on Random Forest

The prediction of traffic accident severity is essential for traffic safety management and control. To achieve high prediction accuracy and model interpretability, we propose a hybrid model that integrates random forest (RF) and Bayesian optimization (BO). In the proposed model, BO-RF, RF is adopted as a basic predictive model and BO is used to tune the parameters of RF. Experimental results show that BO-RF achieves higher accuracy than conventional algorithms. Moreover, BO-RF provides interpretable results by relative importance and a partial dependence plot. We can identify important influential factors for traffic accident severity by relative importance. Further, we can investigate how the influential factors affect traffic accident severity by the partial dependence plot. These results provide insights to mitigate the severity of traffic accident consequences and contribute to the sustainable development of transportation.