Traffic accident detection and condition analysis based on social networking data

Accurate detection of traffic accidents as well as condition analysis are essential to effectively restoring traffic flow and reducing serious injuries and fatalities. This goal can be obtained using an advanced data classification model with a rich source of traffic information. Several systems based on sensors and social networking platforms have been presented recently to detect traffic events and monitor traffic conditions. However, sensor-based systems provide limited information, and may fail owing to the long detection times and high false-alarm rates. In addition, social networking data are unstructured, unpredictable, and contain idioms, jargon, and dynamic topics. The machine learning algorithms utilized for traffic event detection might not extract valuable information from social networking data. In this paper, a social network–based, real-time monitoring framework is proposed for traffic accident detection and condition analysis using ontology and latent Dirichlet allocation (OLDA) and bidirectional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM). First, the query-based search engine effectively collects traffic information from social networks, and the data preprocessing module transforms it into structured form. Second, the proposed OLDA-based topic modeling method automatically labels each sentence (e.g., traffic or non-traffic) to identify the exact traffic information. In addition, the ontology-based event recognition approach detects traffic events from traffic-related data. Next, the sentiment analysis technique identifies the polarity of traffic events employing user's opinions, which helps determine accurate conditions of traffic events. Finally, the FastText model and Bi-LSTM with softmax regression are trained for traffic event detection and condition analysis. The proposed framework is evaluated using traffic-related data, comparing OLDA and Bi-LSTM with existing topic modeling methods and traditional classifiers using word embedding models, respectively. Our system outperforms state-of-the-art methods and achieves accuracy of 97 %. This finding demonstrates that the proposed system is more efficient for traffic event detection and condition analysis, in comparison to other existing systems.