An extreme gradient boosting method for identifying the factors contributing to crash/near-crash events: a naturalistic driving study

Despite the research efforts for reducing traffic accidents, the number of global annual vehicle accidents is still on the rise. This continues to motivate researchers to examine the factors contributing to crash and near-crash events (CNC). Recently, many studies attempted to identify the associated crash factors using naturalistic driving study (SHRP2-NDS) data. Despite the many classifiers developed in the literature, the high dimensionality and multicollinearity within the SHRP2-NDS data limit the accuracy and reliability of the developed models. This study develops an extreme gradient boosting (XGB) classifier, robust to multicollinearity, using the SHRP2-NDS dataset for identifying the factors contributing to CNC events. The performance of the XGB classifier is evaluated against three other advanced machine-learning algorithms. Results indicate that the XGB model outperformed the other models with a detection accuracy of 85% and identified the “driver behavior” and “intersection influence” as the most contributing factors to CNC detection.