A novel rare event approach to measure the randomness and concentration of road accidents

• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0201890
• Publication Date: 2018-08-08T13:33:56Z
• Authors: Rafael Prieto Curiel; Humberto González...; Steven Richard Bi...
• Keywords: Rare events

Background Road accidents are one of the main causes death around world and yet, from a time-space perspective, they rare event. To help us prevent accidents, metric to determine level concentration road in city could aid whether most constrained small number places (hence, environment plays leading role) or dispersed over as whole driver has biggest influence). Methods Here, we apply new metric, Rare Event Concentration Coefficient (RECC), measure based on mixture model applied counts discretised space. A test application tessellation space is shown using two types accident data: an urban recorded London between 2005 2014 motorway Mexico 2015 2016. Findings In terms their concentration, about 5% junctions site 50% while 80% expect close zero accidents. Accidents which occur regions with high rate can be considered have strong component related therefore changes, such intervention change speed limit, might introduced impact measured by changes RECC metric. This procedure helps identify observed at junction decreased time hence track structural settings.