Analysis of road traffic fatal accidents using data mining techniques

Roadway traffic safety is a major concern for transportation governing agencies as well as ordinary citizens. In order to give safe driving suggestions, careful analysis of roadway traffic data is critical to find out variables that are closely related to fatal accidents. In this paper we apply statistics analysis and data mining algorithms on the FARS Fatal Accident dataset as an attempt to address this problem. The relationship between fatal rate and other attributes including collision manner, weather, surface condition, light condition, and drunk driver were investigated. Association rules were discovered by Apriori algorithm, classification model was built by Naive Bayes classifier, and clusters were formed by simple K-means clustering algorithm. Certain safety driving suggestions were made based on statistics, association rules, classification model, and clusters obtained.