Application of Feature Selection Approaches for Prioritizing and Evaluating the Potential Factors for Safety Management in Transportation Systems

Road safety assessment is one of the most important parts of road transport safety management. When road transportation networks are managed safely, they improve the quality of life for citizens and the economy as a whole. On the one hand, there are many factors that affect road safety. On the other hand, this issue is a dynamic problem, which means that it is always changing. So, there is a dire need for a thorough evaluation of road safety to deal with complex and uncertain problems. For this purpose, two machine learning methods called “feature selection algorithms” are used. These algorithms include a combination of artificial neural network (ANN) with the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm and the differential evolution (DE) algorithm. In this study, two data sets with 202 and 564 accident cases from cities and rural areas in southern Italy are investigated and analyzed based on several factors that affect transportation safety, such as light conditions, weekday, type of accident, location, speed limit, average speed, and annual average daily traffic. When the performance and results of the two models were compared, the results showed that the two models made the same choices. In rural areas, the type of accident and the location were chosen as the highest and lowest priorities, respectively. According to the results, useful suggestions regarding the improvement of road safety on urban and rural roads were provided. The average speed and location were considered the highest and lowest priorities in urban areas, respectively. Finally, there was not a big difference between the results of the two algorithms in terms of how well the algorithm models worked, but the proposed PSO model converged more quickly than the proposed DE model.