Comprehensive Analysis of Traffic Accidents in Seoul: Major Factors and Types Affecting Injury Severity

Accident and fatality rates of traffic accidents worldwide are steadily increasing every year; thus, considerable effort has been made to prevent traffic accidents and prepare countermeasures. This study aims to identify the major factors and types that affect the severity of traffic accidents in Seoul by utilizing the Seoul Metropolitan Government’s traffic accident dataset. To achieve this, we perform a comprehensive analysis by adopting various machine learning techniques—not only supervised learning methods but also unsupervised learning methods. As a result of the experiment, we derived several critical factors that were found to affect the severity of traffic accidents via supervised learning methods (i.e., ensemble-based and regression-based algorithms) and discovered dominant accident types via unsupervised learning methods (i.e., clustering-based algorithms). One of our primary findings is that, in contrast to common sense, environmental factors such as weather, season, and day of the week do not significantly affect the severity of traffic accidents in Seoul. Moreover, all methods highlight the importance of pedestrian-related factors, implying that it is highly necessary to prepare more meticulous institutional measures for pedestrians to reduce the negative influence of serious traffic accidents in Seoul.