ReMAHA–CatBoost: Addressing Imbalanced Data in Traffic Accident Prediction Tasks

Abstract

Using historical information from traffic accidents to predict accidents has always been an area of active exploration by researchers in the field of transportation. However, predicting only the occurrence of traffic accidents is insufficient for providing comprehensive information to relevant authorities. Therefore, further classification of predicted traffic accidents is necessary to better identify and prevent potential hazards and the escalation of accidents. Due to the significant disparity in the occurrence rates of different severity levels of traffic accidents, data imbalance becomes a critical issue. To address the challenge of predicting extremely imbalanced traffic accident events, this paper introduces a predictive framework named ReMAHA–CatBoost. To evaluate the effectiveness of ReMAHA–CatBoost, we conducted experiments on the US–Accidents traffic accident dataset, where the class label imbalance reaches up to 91.40 times. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model in this paper exhibits exceptional predictive performance in the domain of imbalanced traffic accident prediction.