Real-Time Traffic Accident Risk Prediction and Geospatial Analysis System: An Intelligent Safety Early Warning Solution Integrating Multi-Source Data

This article introduces a traffic accident risk prediction system that combines machine learning, real-time meteorological data, and geospatial analysis. By integrating multi-source data (historical accident records, real-time weather, road infrastructure, traffic flow), it builds an end-to-end AI-driven web application to realize intelligent identification and early warning of high-risk areas, helping traffic safety management shift from passive post-event handling to active pre-event prevention.

Traffic accidents are one of the main causes of global casualties and property losses. According to WHO statistics, about 1.3 million people die from road accidents every year, and tens of millions are injured or disabled. Traditional traffic safety management relies on passive analysis of historical accident data, making it difficult to achieve active early warning of potential risks. With the development of machine learning and GIS technologies, predictive methods integrating multi-source data are expected to change the management paradigm.

The core architecture of the system is divided into three layers:

1. Data Collection Layer: Integrate historical accident data, real-time meteorological data (rainfall/visibility, etc.), road facility data (type/number of lanes, etc.), and traffic flow sensor data;
2. Machine Learning Prediction Layer: Adopt a random forest + XGBoost/LightGBM ensemble strategy, extract spatiotemporal/meteorological/geographic features, and output accident probability scores for specific areas in the future;
3. Visualization Interaction Layer: Use Leaflet/Mapbox to build interactive maps, display risks with heatmaps/graduated colors, and support time slider queries and area detail viewing.

1. Real-Time Data Pipeline: Access weather services via API, update data hourly with scheduled tasks, and use message queues to handle high-concurrency requests;
2. Geospatial Analysis: Use GeoPandas/Shapely to process spatial data, apply DBSCAN to cluster accident points, and use R-tree indexing to improve query efficiency;
3. Model Deployment: Encapsulate as RESTful API using Flask/FastAPI, deploy with Docker containers, and cache results of high-frequency areas to reduce repeated calculations.

Application scenarios include:

• Traffic management departments: Dynamic allocation of patrol resources;
• Navigation services: Real-time route risk reminders;
• Insurance industry: Dynamic pricing models;
• Urban planning: Optimization of road facility design. The core value is to transform data insights into actionable traffic safety decision support.

Challenges: Data quality issues (incomplete records/inaccurate locations need cleaning and correction); class imbalance (low accident rate, solved by SMOTE oversampling/cost-sensitive learning). Optimization directions: Introduce deep learning (LSTM/Transformer) to capture temporal patterns; use GNN to model road spatial dependencies; apply federated learning to integrate multi-city data.

This system demonstrates the potential of machine learning and geospatial technology in the field of urban safety. It provides an intelligent traffic management framework through multi-source data integration, end-to-end pipelines, and interactive interfaces. With the development of IoT and 5G in the future, data will become more abundant, prediction accuracy will further improve, and it will become an important part of smart city infrastructure.