A machine learning approach for building an adaptive, real-time decision support system for emergency response to...

In this paper, historical data about road traffic accidents are utilized to build a decision support system for emergency response to road traffic injuries in real-time. A cost-sensitive artificial neural network with a novel heuristic cost matrix has been used to build a classifier capable of predicting the injury severity of occupants involved in crashes. The proposed system was designed to be used by the medical services dispatchers to better assess the severity of road traffic injuries, and therefore to better decide the most appropriate emergency response. Taking into account that the nature of accidents may change over time due to several reasons, the system enables users to build an updated version of the prediction model based on the historical and newly reported accidents. A dataset of accidents that occurred over a 6-year period (2008-2013) has been used for demonstration purposes throughout this paper. The accuracy of the prediction model was 65%. The Area Under the Curve (AUC) showed that the generated classifier can reasonably predict the severity of road traffic injuries. Importantly, using the cost-sensitive learning technique, the predictor overcame the problem of imbalanced severity distributions which are inherent in traffic accident datasets.