Modeling Road User Interactions with Dynamic Graph Attention Networks for Traffic Crash Prediction

This paper presents a novel deep learning framework for traffic crash prediction that leverages graph-based representations to model complex interactions among road users. At its core is a dynamic Graph Attention Network (GAT), which abstracts road users and their interactions as evolving nodes and edges in a spatiotemporal graph. Each node represents an individual road user, characterized by its state as features, such as location and velocity. A node-wise Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network is employed to capture the temporal evolution of these features. Edges are dynamically constructed based on spatial and temporal proximity, existing only when distance and time thresholds are met for modeling interaction relevance. The GAT learns attention-weighted representations of these dynamic interactions, which are subsequently used by a classifier to predict the risk of a crash. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed GAT-based method achieves 86.1% prediction accuracy, highlighting its effectiveness for proactive collision risk assessment and its potential to inform real-time warning systems and preventive safety interventions.