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• Bus crashes are investigated by crash dataset of the State of Victoria, Australia. • Data mining used to discover chain of factors that lead to fatality in bus crashes. • Bus crashes with non-motor vehicles and on weekends increase fatality risk. • Old driver, intersection and vulnerable user increase fatality in non-motor crashes. • Fatal crash on weekend is linked to darkness, speed, pedestrian and female driver. Introduction: Buses are different vehicles in terms of dimensions, maneuverability, and driver's vision. Although bus traveling is a safe mode to travel, the number of annual bus crashes cannot be neglected. Moreover, limited studies have been conducted on the bus involved in fatal crashes. Therefore, identification of the contributing factors in the bus involved fatal crashes can reduce the risk of fatality. Method: Data set of bus involved crashes in the State of Victoria, Australia was analyzed over the period of 2006–2019. Clustering of crash data was accomplished by dividing them into homogeneous categories, and by implementing association rules discovery on the clusters, the factors affecting fatality in bus involved crashes were extracted. Results: Clustering results show bus crashes with all vehicles except motor vehicles and weekend crashes have a high rate of fatality. According to the association rule discovery findings, the factors that increase the risk of bus crashes with non-motor vehicles are: old bus driver, collision with pedestrians at signalized intersections, and the presence of vulnerable road users. Likewise, factors that increase the risk of fatality in bus involved crashes on weekends are: darkness of roads in high-speed zones, pedestrian presence at highways, bus crashes with passenger car by a female bus driver, and the occurrence of multi-vehicle crashes in high-speed zones. Practical Applications: The study provides a sequential pattern of factors, named rules that lead to fatality in bus involved crashes. By eliminating or improving one or all of the factors involved in rules, fatal bus crashes may be prevented. The recommendations to reduce fatality in bus crashes are: observing safe distances with the buses, using road safety campaigns to reduce pedestrians' distracted behavior, improving the lighting conditions, implementing speed bumps and rumble strips in high-speed zones, installing pedestrian detection systems on buses and setting special bus lanes in crowded areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Developing a novel approach for using trip sequences instead of separate trips. • Developing a unique similarity measure for the trip sequences. • Focusing only on the temporal attributes of the trip sequences. • Running the method on real-world case studies. • Evaluating the performance of the developed method. • Comparing the outcome with the existing literature. • Achieving a considerable improvement in inferring the trip purpose. Smart card transactions are known as a rich and continuous source of public transit data, but they miss some important attributes about trips and passengers. One of these missing attributes is the trip purpose attribute. This paper proposes a novel method to infer the trip purpose attribute from the sequences of trips of passengers instead of separate trips. The proposed method infers the trip purpose attribute (a missing attribute in the smart card data) from the temporal attributes (available attributes in the smart card data). First, the relation between the temporal attributes and the trip purpose attribute is learnt by discovering clusters of passengers in the Household Travel Survey dataset while each passenger is represented by one sequence of trips. Then, the discovered clusters are utilized to infer the trip purpose of smart card transactions by allocating each passenger to the closest clusters. The proposed method is implemented on the smart card and HTS datasets from southeast Queensland, Australia. The evaluation results showed a considerable improvement in inferring the trip purpose compared to the results published in the literature. Notably, the effect of considering the trip sequence was more significant than considering land use variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]