A Feature Selection-Based Multi-Stage Methodology for Improving Driver Injury Severity Prediction on Imbalanced Crash Data
Çiğdem İnan ACI | Gizen Mutlu | Murat Ozen | Esra Sarac | Vahide Nida Kılıç Uzel
Predicting driver injury severity is critical for enhancing road safety, but it is complicated because fatal accidents inherently create class imbalance within datasets. This study conducts a comparative analysis of machine-learning (ML) and deep-learning (DL) models for multi-class driver injury severity prediction using a comprehensive dataset of 107,195 traffic accidents from the Adana, Mersin, and Antalya provinces in Turkey (2018–2023). To address the significant imbalance between fatal, injury, and non-injury classes, the hybrid SMOTE-ENN algorithm was employed for data balancing. Subsequently, feature selection techniques, including Relief-F, Extra Trees, and Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE), were utilized to identify the most influential predictors. Various ML models (K-Nearest ...
Enhanced Multi-Class Driver Injury Severity Prediction Using a Hybrid Deep Learning and Random Forest Approach
Çiğdem İnan Acı | Gizen Mutlu | Murat Ozen | Mehmet Acı
Predicting driver injury severity and identifying factors influencing crash outcomes are crucial for developing effective traffic safety measures. This study focuses on estimating driver injury severity (uninjured, injured, or killed) and determining critical factors affecting crash outcomes. A hybrid framework combining Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) and Random Forest (RF) is proposed, where a DNN extracts features and RF performs the final classification, leveraging ensemble methods. The results were compared with those of well-known methods (e.g., kNN, XGBoost), with the hybrid approach achieving the best performance (0.92 accuracy, 0.89 F1-macro, 0.91 F1-micro scores) in predicting injury severity. The results showed that crash type, vehicle type, driver fault, intersection type, season, ...