Title

Using a reliability process to reduce uncertainty in predicting crashes at unsignalized intersections

Authors

Authors

K. Haleem; M. Abdel-Aty;K. Mackie

Comments

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Abbreviated Journal Title

Accid. Anal. Prev.

Keywords

Negative binomial model; Reliability; Bayesian updating; 3-Legged; unsignalized intersection; 4-Legged unsignalized intersection; Crash; prediction; MOTOR-VEHICLE CRASHES; DISPERSION PARAMETER; SIGNALIZED INTERSECTIONS; ACCIDENT MODELS; POISSON-GAMMA; ROAD SECTIONS; SITES; Ergonomics; Public, Environmental & Occupational Health; Social; Sciences, Interdisciplinary; Transportation

Abstract

The negative binomial (NB) model has been used extensively by traffic safety analysts as a crash prediction model, because it can accommodate the over-dispersion criterion usually exhibited in crash count data. However, the NB model is still a probabilistic model that may benefit from updating the parameters of the covariates to better predict crash frequencies at intersections. The objective of this paper is to examine the effect of updating the parameters of the covariates in the fitted NB model using a Bayesian updating reliability method to more accurately predict crash frequencies at 3-legged and 4-legged unsignalized intersections. For this purpose, data from 433 unsignalized intersections in Orange County, Florida were collected and used in the analysis. Four Bayesian-structure models were examined: (1) a non-informative prior with a log-gamma likelihood function, (2) a non-informative prior with an NB likelihood function, (3) an informative prior with an NB likelihood function, and (4) an informative prior with a log-gamma likelihood function. Standard measures of model effectiveness, such as the Akaike information criterion (AIC), mean absolute deviance (MAD), mean square prediction error (MSPE) and overall prediction accuracy, were used to compare the NB and Bayesian model predictions. Considering only the best estimates of the model parameters (ignoring uncertainty), both the NB and Bayesian models yielded favorable results. However, when considering the standard errors for the fitted parameters as a surrogate measure for measuring uncertainty, the Bayesian methods yielded more promising results. The full Bayesian updating framework using the log-gamma likelihood function for updating parameter estimates of the NB probabilistic models resulted in the least standard error values. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Journal Title

Accident Analysis and Prevention

Volume

42

Issue/Number

2

Publication Date

1-1-2010

Document Type

Article

Language

English

First Page

654

Last Page

666

WOS Identifier

WOS:000275510600039

ISSN

0001-4575

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