Text Mining the Contributors to Rail Accidents

Abstract:

Text mining, also referred to astextdatamining, roughly equivalent totextanalytics, refers to the process of deriving high-quality information fromtext. High-quality information is typically derived through the devising of patterns and trends through means such as statistical pattern learning.

Rail accidents represent an important safety concern for the transportation industry in many countries. In the 11 years from 2001 to 2012, the U.S. had more than 40 000 rail accidents that cost more than $45 million. While most of the accidents during this period had very little cost, about 5200 had damages in excess of $141 500. To better understand the contributors to these extreme accidents, the Federal Railroad Administration has required the railroads involved in accidents to submit reports that contain both fixed field entries and narratives that describe the characteristics of the accident. While a number of studies have looked at the fixed fields, none have done an extensive analysis of the narratives. This paper describes the use of text mining with a combination of techniques to automatically discover accident characteristics that can inform a better understanding of the contributors to the accidents. The study evaluates the efficacy of text mining of accident narratives by assessing predictive performance for the costs of extreme accidents. The results show that predictive accuracy for accident costs significantly improves through the use of features found by text mining and predictive accuracy further improves through the use of modern ensemble methods. Importantly, this study also shows through case examples how the findings from text mining of the narratives can improve understanding of the contributors to rail accidents in ways not possible through only fixed field analysis of the accident reports.

Apriori Algorithm:

TheApriori Algorithmis an influentialalgorithmfor mining frequent item sets for Boolean association rules.

•APrioriuses a "bottom up" approach, where frequent subsets are extended one item at a time (a step known as candidate generation, and groups of candidates are tested against the data. Apriori is designed to operate ondatabasescontaining transactions (for example, collections of items bought by customers, or details of a website frequentation). Other algorithms are designed for finding association rules in data having no transactionsor having no timestamps (DNA sequencing). Each transaction is seen as a set of items (anitem set). Given a threshold{\displaystyle C},,the Apriori algorithm identifies the item sets which are subsets of at least{\displaystyle C}transactions in the database.

Module Description:

Generate Accident Report

This paper integrates methods for safety analysis with accident report data and text mining to uncover contributors to rail accidents. This section describes related work in rail and, more generally, transportation safety and also introduces the relevant data and text mining techniques.

Characteristics of Accident Report

This report has a number of fields that include characteristics of the train or trains, the personnel on the trainsoperational conditions (e.g., speed at the time of accident, highest speed before the accident, number of cars, and weight), and the primary cause of the accident.

This field has become increasingly important because of the large amounts of data available in documents, news articles, research papers, and accident reports.

Stored In databases:

Text databases are semi structured because in addition to the free text they also contain structured fields that have the titles, authors, dates, and other Meta data. The accident reports used in this paper are semi structured.

Step by Step Process:

User:

User Register the Accident details and casualty details.

All the details stored in the Database.

Admin:

Admin can verify the Accident details.

Predict the accident and casualty details.

SYSTEM SPECIFICATION

Hardware Requirements:

•System: Pentium IV 2.4 GHz.

•Hard Disk : 40 GB.

•Floppy Drive: 1.44 Mb.

•Monitor : 14’ Colour Monitor.

•Mouse: Optical Mouse.

•Ram : 512 Mb.

Software Requirements:

•Operating system : Windows 7 Ultimate.

•Coding Language: ASP.Net with C#

•Front-End: Visual Studio 2010 Professional.

•Data Base: SQL Server 2008.

Conclusion:

In this Paper, show that the combination of text analysis with ensemble methods can improve the accuracy of models for predicting accident severity and that text analysis can provide insights into accident characteristics. Modern text analysis methods make the narratives in the accident reports almost as accessible for detailed analysis as the fixed fields in the reports. More importantly as the examples illustrated, text mining of the narratives can provide a much richer amount of information than is possible in the fixed fields.Finally, as described in the work here used standard methods to clean the narratives. However, train accident narratives use jargon common to the rail transport industry and classical stemming and stop word removal do not necessarily do a good job of characterizing the words used in this industry. For train safety analysis, text mining could benefit from a careful look at ways to extract features from text that takes advantage of language characteristics particular to the rail transport industry.