The Importance of Exercise and General Mental Health on Prediction of Property-Damage-Only Accidents among Taxi Drivers in Tehran: A Study Using ANFIS-PSO and Regression Models

The rate of traffic accidents in Iran is high, and the majority of the causes that must be investigated are human factors. The present study examined the effects of exercise and general health as human factors on the prediction of crash likelihood with the data collected from taxi drivers of Tehran. The data were collected using the general health questionnaire and a form entailing some items regarding the duration of daily exercise and sociodemographic information. The adaptive neurofuzzy inference system and particle swarm optimization (ANFIS-PSO) was used for tuning the parameters of membership function of the fuzzy model applied for this prediction. Thus system was compared with the more conventional methods, such as multiple regression and Poisson regression. To avoid the overfitting issue, the data were divided into 70% for training and 30% for validation. The root-mean-square error (RMSE) was also utilized as a determinant of goodness of fit between ANFIS-PSO and regression methods. The findings indicated that the number of minutes of daily exercise and mental health significantly influence property-damage-only (PDO) accidents of taxi drivers in Tehran, Iran. Furthermore, the results revealed that the hybrid model (ANFIS-PSO) not only had a better fit but also produced different results from those of the traditional regression models, which may be used in policymaking regarding the reduction of PDO accidents. Based on the results, performing daily exercise for more than 10 minutes would substantially reduce the PDO accidents among the taxi drivers in Tehran. The findings showed that ANFIS-PSO could be effectively implemented in the studies addressing accident frequency. Consequently, the policy makers should simply adopt some interventions to encourage the taxi drivers to perform daily exercise that not only improves their wellbeing but also reduces the risk of PDO accidents.