24,916 research outputs found
High-Resolution Road Vehicle Collision Prediction for the City of Montreal
Road accidents are an important issue of our modern societies, responsible
for millions of deaths and injuries every year in the world. In Quebec only, in
2018, road accidents are responsible for 359 deaths and 33 thousands of
injuries. In this paper, we show how one can leverage open datasets of a city
like Montreal, Canada, to create high-resolution accident prediction models,
using big data analytics. Compared to other studies in road accident
prediction, we have a much higher prediction resolution, i.e., our models
predict the occurrence of an accident within an hour, on road segments defined
by intersections. Such models could be used in the context of road accident
prevention, but also to identify key factors that can lead to a road accident,
and consequently, help elaborate new policies.
We tested various machine learning methods to deal with the severe class
imbalance inherent to accident prediction problems. In particular, we
implemented the Balanced Random Forest algorithm, a variant of the Random
Forest machine learning algorithm in Apache Spark. Interestingly, we found that
in our case, Balanced Random Forest does not perform significantly better than
Random Forest.
Experimental results show that 85% of road vehicle collisions are detected by
our model with a false positive rate of 13%. The examples identified as
positive are likely to correspond to high-risk situations. In addition, we
identify the most important predictors of vehicle collisions for the area of
Montreal: the count of accidents on the same road segment during previous
years, the temperature, the day of the year, the hour and the visibility
A critical assessment of imbalanced class distribution problem: the case of predicting freshmen student attrition
Predicting student attrition is an intriguing yet challenging problem for any academic institution. Class-imbalanced data is a common in the field of student retention, mainly because a lot of students register but fewer students drop out. Classification techniques for imbalanced dataset can yield deceivingly high
prediction accuracy where the overall predictive accuracy is usually driven by the majority class at the expense of having very poor performance on the crucial minority class. In this study, we compared different data balancing techniques to improve the predictive accuracy in minority class while maintaining satisfactory overall classification performance. Specifically, we tested three balancing techniquesāoversampling, under-sampling and synthetic minority over-sampling (SMOTE)āalong with four popular classification methodsālogistic regression, decision trees, neuron networks and support vector machines. We used a large and feature rich institutional student data (between the years 2005 and 2011) to assess the efficacy of both balancing techniques as well as prediction methods. The results indicated that the support vector machine combined with SMOTE data-balancing technique achieved the best classification performance with a 90.24% overall accuracy on the 10-fold holdout sample. All three data-balancing techniques improved the prediction accuracy for the minority class. Applying sensitivity analyses on developed models, we also identified the most important variables for accurate prediction of student attrition. Application of these models has the potential to accurately predict at-risk students and help reduce student dropout rates
An empirical evaluation of imbalanced data strategies from a practitioner's point of view
This research tested the following well known strategies to deal with binary
imbalanced data on 82 different real life data sets (sampled to imbalance rates
of 5%, 3%, 1%, and 0.1%): class weight, SMOTE, Underbagging, and a baseline
(just the base classifier). As base classifiers we used SVM with RBF kernel,
random forests, and gradient boosting machines and we measured the quality of
the resulting classifier using 6 different metrics (Area under the curve,
Accuracy, F-measure, G-mean, Matthew's correlation coefficient and Balanced
accuracy). The best strategy strongly depends on the metric used to measure the
quality of the classifier. For AUC and accuracy class weight and the baseline
perform better; for F-measure and MCC, SMOTE performs better; and for G-mean
and balanced accuracy, underbagging
Hellinger Distance Trees for Imbalanced Streams
Classifiers trained on data sets possessing an imbalanced class distribution
are known to exhibit poor generalisation performance. This is known as the
imbalanced learning problem. The problem becomes particularly acute when we
consider incremental classifiers operating on imbalanced data streams,
especially when the learning objective is rare class identification. As
accuracy may provide a misleading impression of performance on imbalanced data,
existing stream classifiers based on accuracy can suffer poor minority class
performance on imbalanced streams, with the result being low minority class
recall rates. In this paper we address this deficiency by proposing the use of
the Hellinger distance measure, as a very fast decision tree split criterion.
We demonstrate that by using Hellinger a statistically significant improvement
in recall rates on imbalanced data streams can be achieved, with an acceptable
increase in the false positive rate.Comment: 6 Pages, 2 figures, to be published in Proceedings 22nd International
Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR) 201
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