Enhancing Traffic Accident Severity Prediction: Feature Identification Using Explainable AI

The latest developments in Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) have greatly enhanced the comfort and safety of drivers. These technologies can identify driver abnormalities like fatigue, inattention, and impairment, which are essential for averting collisions. One of the important aspects of this technology is automated traffic accident detection and prediction, which may help in saving precious human lives. This study aims to explore critical features related to traffic accident detection and prevention. A public US traffic accident dataset was used for the aforementioned task, where various machine learning (ML) models were applied to predict traffic accidents. These ML models included Random Forest, AdaBoost, KNN, and SVM. The models were compared for their accuracies, where Random Forest was found to be the best-performing model, providing the most accurate and reliable classification of accident-related data. Owing to the black box nature of ML models, this best-fit ML model was executed with explainable AI (XAI) methods such as LIME and permutation importance to understand its decision-making for the given classification task. The unique aspect of this study is the introduction of explainable artificial intelligence which enables us to have human-interpretable awareness of how ML models operate. It provides information about the inner workings of the model and directs the improvement of feature engineering for traffic accident detection, which is more accurate and dependable. The analysis identified critical features, including sources, descriptions of weather conditions, time of day (weather timestamp, start time, end time), distance, crossing, and traffic signals, as significant predictors of the probability of an accident occurring. Future ADAS technology development is anticipated to be greatly impacted by the study’s conclusions. A model can be adjusted for different driving scenarios by identifying the most important features and comprehending their dynamics to make sure that ADAS systems are precise, reliable, and suitable for real-world circumstances.