Abstract
Traffic accident is one of the major cause of death worldwide for the last several decades. According to the statistics of world health organization, approximately 1.24 million deaths occurred on the world's roads in 2010. In order to reduce future traffic accident, multipronged approaches have been adopted including traffic regulations, injury-reducing technologies, driving training program and so on. Records on traffic accidents are generated and maintained for this purpose. To make these records meaningful and effective, it is necessary to analyze relationship between traffic accident and related factors including vehicle design, road design, weather, driver behavior etc. Insight derived from these analysis can be used for accident prevention approaches. Traffic accident data mining is an activity to find useful knowledges about such relationship that is not well-known and user may interested in it. Many studies about mining accident data have been reported over the past two decades. Most of studies mainly focused on predict risk of accident using accident related factors. Supervised learning methods like decision tree, logistic regression, k-nearest neighbor, neural network are used for these prediction. However, derived prediction model from these algorithms are too complex to understand for human itself because the main purpose of these algorithms are prediction, not explanation of the data. Some of studies use unsupervised clustering algorithm to dividing the data into several groups, but derived group itself is still not easy to understand for human, so it is necessary to do some additional analytic works. Rule based learning methods are adequate when we want to derive comprehensive form of knowledge about the target domain. It derives a set of if-then rules that represent relationship between the target feature with other features. Rules are fairly easy for human to understand its meaning therefore it can help provide insight and comprehensible results for human. Association rule learning methods and subgroup discovery methods are representing rule based learning methods for descriptive task. These two algorithms have been used in a wide range of area from transaction analysis, accident data analysis, detection of statistically significant patient risk groups, discovering key person in social communities and so on. We use both the association rule learning method and the subgroup discovery method to discover useful patterns from a traffic accident dataset consisting of many features including profile of driver, location of accident, types of accident, information of vehicle, violation of regulation and so on. The association rule learning method, which is one of the unsupervised learning methods, searches for frequent item sets from the data and translates them into rules. In contrast, the subgroup discovery method is a kind of supervised learning method that discovers rules of user specified concepts satisfying certain degree of generality and unusualness. Depending on what aspect of the data we are focusing our attention to, we may combine different multiple relevant features of interest to make a synthetic target feature, and give it to the rule learning algorithms. After a set of rules is derived, some postprocessing steps are taken to make the ruleset more compact and easier to understand by removing some uninteresting or redundant rules. We conducted a set of experiments of mining our traffic accident data in both unsupervised mode and supervised mode for comparison of these rule based learning algorithms. Experiments with the traffic accident data reveals that the association rule learning, in its pure unsupervised mode, can discover some hidden relationship among the features. Under supervised learning setting with combinatorial target feature, however, the subgroup discovery method finds good rules much more easily than the association rule learning method that requires a lot of efforts to tune the parameters.
교통사고의 원인을 규명하고 미래의 사고를 방지하기 위한 노력의 일환으로 데이터 마이닝 기법을 이용한 교통 데이터 분석의 연구가 이루어지고 있다. 하지만 기존의 교통 데이터를 이용한 마이닝 연구들은 학습된 결과를 사람이 이해하기 어려워 분석에 많은 노력이 필요하다는 문제가 있었다. 본 논문에서는 많은 속성들로 표현된 교통사고 데이터로부터 유용한 패턴을 발견하기 위해 규칙 학습 기반의 데이터 마이닝 기법인 연관규칙 학습기법과 서브그룹 발견기법을 적용하였다. 연관규칙 학습기법은 비지도 학습 기법의 하나로 데이터 내에서 동시에 많이 등장하는 아이템(item)들을 찾아 규칙의 형태로 가공해 주며, 서브그룹 발견기법은 사용자가 지정한 대상 속성이 결론부에 나타나는 규칙을 학습하는 지도학습 기반 기법으로 일반성과 흥미도가 높은 규칙을 학습한다. 규칙 학습 시 사용자의 의도를 반영하기 위해서는 하나 이상의 관심 속성들을 조합한 합성 속성을 만들어 규칙을 학습할 수 있다. 규칙이 도출되고 나면 후처리 과정을 통해 중복된 규칙을 제거하고 유사한 규칙을 일반화하여 규칙들을 더 단순하고 이해하기 쉬운 형태로 가공한다. 교통사고 데이터를 대상으로 두 기법을 적용한 결과 대상 속성을 지정하지 않고 연관규칙 학습기법을 적용하는 경우 사용자가 쉽게 알기 어려운 속성 사이의 숨겨진 관계를 발견할 수 있었으며, 대상 속성을 지정하여 연관규칙 학습기법과 서브그룹 발견기법을 적용하는 경우 파라미터 조정에 많은 노력을 기울여야 하는 연관규칙 학습기법에 비해 서브그룹 발견기법이 흥미로운 규칙들을 더 쉽게 찾을 수 있음을 확인하였다.
