Abstract: Road crash prediction is a fundamental key in designing efficient intelligent transportation systems. There has been a pronounced progress in the use of machine learning models for crash events assessment by the transportation safety research community in recent years. However, little attention has been paid so far to evaluating reduced-visibility crash occurrences within a heuristic ensemble system. This study presents a proactive multicriteria decision-making system that can predict crash occurrences based on real-time roadway properties, land zones’ characteristics, vehicle telemetry, driver inputs and weather conditions collected using a desktop driving simulator. A key novelty of this work is implementing a genetic algorithm-based feature selection approach along with ensemble modeling strategies using AdaBoost, XGBoost and RF techniques to establish effective crash predictions. Furthermore, since crash events occur in rare instances tending to be underrepresented in the dataset, an imbalance-learning methodology to overcome the issue was adopted on the basis of several data resampling approaches to increase the predictive performance namely SMOTE, Borderline-SMOTE, SMOTE-Tomek Links and ADASYN strategies. To our knowledge, there has been a limited interest at adopting an ensemble-based imbalance-learning strategy examining the impact of real-time features’ combinations on the prediction of road crash events under reduced visibility settings.
