Road accident data analysis using Bayesian networks

Bayesian Networks (BNs) are graphical probabilistic models representing the joint probability function over a set of random variables using a directed acyclic graphical structure. In this paper, we consider a road accident data set collected at one of the popular highways in Iran. Implementing the well-known parents and children algorithm, as a constraint-based approach, we construct a BN model for the available accident data. Once the structure of the BN is learnt, we concentrate on the parameter-learning task. We compute the maximum-likelihood estimates of some parameters of interest, specifically, conditional probability of fatalities in the network.