Developing a crash severity model based on multi objective evolutionary feature selection approaches

The main purpose of this article is assessing the capability of multiobjective optimisation evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) along with machine learning method on predicting the crash injury severity with the approach of reducing input variables. Dataset of crashes which were occurred in Iran was analysed over the period of 2016–2020. The data were classified into two classes in terms of injury severity: fatal and non-fatal datasets. At first, general prediction models were created by inserting 31 available input variables into support vector machine (SVM) method based on two imbalanced and obtained balanced datasets. A cluster based under sampling technique was used to obtained balanced data. Then evolutionary algorithms of two objectives optimisation algorithms namely non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II), multi-objective evolutionary algorithm based on decomposition (MOEA/D), and pareto envelope-based selection algorithm (PESA-II) along with SVM were used to select features that significantly affect the severity of crashes and developed the simplified models. Then the simplified developed model was compared to the model which was prepared with random forest (RF) method in feature selection. It is shown that the simplified model developed by combined MOEAs and SVM is more appropriate to accurately predict the crash severity, considering the number of input variables in comparison to RF.