Analysis of the severity of vehicle-bicycle crashes with data mining techniques.

• This paper is dedicated to vehicle-bicycle crash severity modeling. • The class-imbalanced issue in vehicle-bicycle crash severity analysis is handled with the imbalanced data resampling process. • To address the complexity of crash dataset, the learning-based feature extraction process is adopted in an iterative manner, such that the the most significant contributing factors to the severity of vehicle-bicycle crashes are determined and the trade-off between computation time and model performance is catered for. • The vehicle-bicycle crash dataset in this paper contains a large number of discrete variables. The gradient boosting algorithm is applied to handle the large number of categories and does not rely on strict statistical assumptions. • The impact of the most significant contributing factors on the severity of vehiclebicycle crashes are explained with the marginal effect analysis. • The result can provide some implications for policies and counter-measures for fatal and serious vehicle-bicycle crashes. Introduction: Although cycling is increasingly being promoted for transportation, the safety concern of bicyclists is one of the major impediments to their adoption. A thorough investigation on the contributing factors to fatalities and injuries involving bicyclist. Method: This paper designs an integrated data mining framework to determine the significant factors that contribute to the severity of vehicle-bicycle crashes based on the crash dataset of Victorian, Australia (2013–2018). The framework integrates imbalanced data resampling, learning-based feature extraction with gradient boosting algorithm and marginal effect analysis. The top 10 significant predictors of the severity of vehicle-bicycle crashes are extracted, which gives an area under ROC curve (AUC) value of 0.8236 and computing time as 37.8 s. Results: The findings provide insights for understanding and developing countermeasures or policy initiatives to reduce severe vehicle-bicycle crashes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]