SARIMA Modelling Approach for Forecasting of Traffic Accidents

To achieve greater sustainability of the traffic system, the trend of traffic accidents in road traffic was analysed. Injuries from traffic accidents are among the leading factors in the suffering of people around the world. Injuries from road traffic accidents are predicted to be the third leading factor contributing to human deaths. Road traffic accidents have decreased in most countries during the last decade because of the Decade of Action for Road Safety 2011–2020. The main reasons behind the reduction of traffic accidents are improvements in the construction of vehicles and roads, the training and education of drivers, and advances in medical technology and medical care. The primary objective of this paper is to investigate the pattern in the time series of traffic accidents in the city of Belgrade. Time series have been analysed using exploratory data analysis to describe and understand the data, the method of regression and the Box–Jenkins seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average model (SARIMA). The study found that the time series has a pronounced seasonal character. The model presented in the paper has a mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 5.22% and can be seen as an indicator that the prognosis is acceptably accurate. The forecasting, in the context of number of a traffic accidents, may be a strategy to achieve different goals such as traffic safety campaigns, traffic safety strategies and action plans to achieve the objectives defined in traffic safety strategies.