Accident Prediction Models for Winter Road Safety

Most accident prediction models are developed with single-level count data models, such as the traditional negative binomial models with fixed or varying dispersion parameters, assuming independence of data. For many accident data sets in road safety analysis, especially those that are highly disaggregated (hourly data), a hierarchical structure in the data often manifests in some form of correlation. Crash prediction models developed with aggregate data could produce biased results because of the assumption of data independence and inflation of the adequacy of the model's explanation because of the use of aggregate data. The potential effects of data aggregation and correlation on accident prediction models are investigated. The analysis uses an accident database that includes hour-level and storm-level accident counts for individual winter snowstorms at four highway sections in Ontario, Canada. Models of two levels of aggregation, aggregated event-based models and disaggregated hourly based models, were developed. The effect of data aggregation had a significant effect on model results, whereas the difference between conventional regression and multilevel regression was inconsequential.

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