Analysis of Vehicle Crash Injury-Severity in a Superhighway: A Markovian Approach

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), road traffic accidents is one of the top causes of death worldwide that claims roughly 1.3 million lives annually. In the Philippines, the Philippine National Police-Highway Patrol Group (PNP-HPG) data showed that there were 15,572 road accidents nationwide for the whole of 2014, with 1,252 persons killed and 9,347 others injured. A comprehensive study was conducted which aims to determine which road traffic accident factors are significant with the severity of road traffic accidents, determine which factors are significant per level of severity, and determine the human factors associated in the occurrence of road traffic accidents that are significant with the levels of severity. Markov Chain Switching Approach enables to determine the probability of occurrence of road traffic accidents and the significant factors that affects the severity of a road traffic accident since it takes into consideration the heterogeneity of the variables and the different time-varying and time-dependent constraints which are not considered by other regression techniques used in road traffic accidents severity literature.