Toward safer highways, application of XGBoost and SHAP for real-time accident detection and feature analysis.

Detecting traffic accidents as rapidly as possible is essential for traffic safety. In this study, we use eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost)-a Machine Learning (ML) technique-to detect the occurrence of accidents using a set of real time data comprised of traffic, network, demographic, land use, and weather features. The data used from the Chicago metropolitan expressways was collected between December 2016 and December 2017, and it includes 244 traffic accidents and 6073 non-accident cases.

Real-time accident detection: Coping with imbalanced data.

Detecting accidents is of great importance since they often impose significant delay and inconvenience to road users. This study compares the performance of two popular machine learning models, Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Probabilistic Neural Network (PNN), to detect the occurrence of accidents on the Eisenhower expressway in Chicago. Accordingly, since the detection of accidents should be as rapid as possible, seven models are trained and tested for each machine learning technique, using traffic condition data from 1 to 7 min after the actual occurrence.