How the choice of safety performance function affects the identification of important crash prediction variables.

Across the nation, researchers and transportation engineers are developing safety performance functions (SPFs) to predict crash rates and develop crash modification factors to improve traffic safety at roadway segments and intersections. Generalized linear models (GLMs), such as Poisson or negative binomial regression, are most commonly used to develop SPFs with annual average daily traffic as the primary roadway characteristic to predict crashes. However, while more complex to interpret, data mining models such as boosted regression trees have improved upon GLMs crash prediction performance due to their ability to handle more data characteristics, accommodate non-linearities, and include interaction effects between the characteristics.