Identification of Road Safety Behavior Patterns in Colombia Using Explainable Artificial Intelligence

This study identifies and explains road safety behavior patterns in Colombia using explainable artificial intelligence (XAI). Based on 9232 records and 38 variables from the Territorial Survey of Road Safety Behavior, the CRISP-DM methodology was applied, including data cleaning, normalization, encoding, and feature selection. XGBoost, Random Forest, Bagging, and AdaBoost models were evaluated, incorporating three domain-specific indices: Distraction Index (DI), Risky Road Interaction Index (RRI), and Normative Compliance Index (NCI). AdaBoost achieved the best overall balance (Precision = 0.78; Recall = 0.75; F1-score = 0.77), simultaneously reducing false positives and false negatives. SHAP analysis revealed that environmental and infrastructure factors (lighting, traffic signals, intersections, congestion, perceived crime) explain more variance than self-reported behaviors (mobile phone use, alcohol consumption, speeding). The complementary indices indicated above-average distraction levels, high exposure to risky interactions, and low compliance in specific segments. These findings enable the prioritization of targeted interventions (improvements in lighting and crossings, focused enforcement, and educational campaigns) and support operation with thresholds adjusted to error costs, providing traceable decision support for public road safety policies. Overall, the proposed approach integrates prediction and explainability to enable actionable decisions and continuous monitoring aimed at reducing traffic accidents.