Learning the City’s Hidden Danger: A Continuous Hazard Field Intelligence Framework for Traffic Accident Emergence and Urban Safety Prediction

Urban traffic accidents emerge from complex interactions among traffic instability, roadway structure, environmental disturbance, and temporal dynamics, yet many existing prediction approaches still treat accident risk as a discrete classification problem over isolated observations. This study proposes a Continuous Hazard Field Intelligence Framework for Traffic Accident Emergence and Urban Safety Prediction, which models hidden urban danger as a topology-aware spatio-temporal hazard field that evolves continuously across connected transportation infrastructure. The framework integrates heterogeneous urban traffic observations, including incident records, crash data, roadway attributes, temporal cues, and contextual risk factors, into a unified hazard-aware learning pipeline. A dedicated preprocessing strategy combines topology-constrained spatial alignment, temporal hazard window embedding, risk-diffusion feature lifting, hazard-sensitive normalization, and continuous hazard surface initialization to convert fragmented event-centered observations into a smooth and learning-ready hazard representation. A structured deep learning architecture is then developed to perform spatial hazard encoding, temporal hazard evolution, continuous hazard reconstruction, and localized accident emergence prediction. Experimental evaluation was conducted on two large-scale real-world traffic safety datasets, namely the XTraffic Incident Dataset (2022–2024) with 1,441,904 records and the Motor Vehicle Collisions–Crashes Dataset with 2,026,647 records. All model configurations were evaluated under the same experimental setting, using the same dataset-specific preprocessing protocol, a 70/30 train–test split, and identical evaluation metrics. The final CHFI configuration achieves 99.12% accuracy, 98.94% precision, 98.76% recall, 98.85% F1-score, and 0.998 AUC on Dataset 1, and 98.63% accuracy, 98.41% precision, 98.16% recall, 98.28% F1-score, and 0.997 AUC on Dataset 2. Compared with the initial non-hazard-aware baseline configuration evaluated under the same data split and evaluation protocol, the final CHFI model improves the F1-score by 7.91 percentage points on Dataset 1 and 8.26 percentage points on Dataset 2. These results indicate that the proposed hazard-field formulation can improve accident-emergence prediction within the controlled experimental setting, while the reported gains should be interpreted relative to the specified baseline and evaluation design.