A fatal point concept and a low-sensitivity quantitative measure for traffic safety analytics

Abstract: The variability of the clusters generated by clustering techniques in the domain of latitude and longitude variables of fatal crash data are significantly unpredictable. This unpredictability, caused by the randomness of fatal crash incidents, reduces the accuracy of crash frequency (i.e., counts of fatal crashes per cluster) which is used to measure traffic safety in practice. In this paper, a quantitative measure of traffic safety that is not significantly affected by the aforementioned variability is proposed. It introduces a fatal point -- a segment with the highest frequency of fatality -- concept based on cluster characteristics and detects them by imposing rounding errors to the hundredth decimal place of the longitude. The frequencies of the cluster and the cluster's fatal point are combined to construct a low-sensitive quantitative measure of traffic safety for the cluster. The performance of the proposed measure of traffic safety is then studied by varying the parameter k of k-means clustering with the expectation that other clustering techniques can be adopted in a similar fashion. The 2015 North Carolina fatal crash dataset of Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) is used to evaluate the proposed fatal point concept and perform experimental analysis to determine the effectiveness of the proposed measure. The empirical study shows that the average traffic safety, measured by the proposed quantitative measure over several clusters, is not significantly affected by the variability, compared to that of the standard crash frequency.