The impact of car accidents in human lives calls for a profound understanding of accident risk. However, the unpredictability of accidents and the unfeasibility of their reproduction make it difficult to identify the causes and patterns underlying individual accidents. In this paper, we study personal driving habits, which provide a promising direction for understanding accidents and could inform various accident prevention techniques. Despite the intuition on their relation with accidents, driving habits have been relatively underexplored due to the difficulty of observing drivers and collecting data at a large-scale.

We conduct a study with real driving data and accident records collected from more than 6,000 drivers during 18 months. We explore various behavioral features to characterize driving habits and identify which habits are associated with accidents. We also analyze how these driving features can be used to predict accidents and compare behavior-based predictive models with demographics-based and distance-based models, which are widely used in practice. Our findings provide meaningful implications for the design of intelligent car safety systems.

About Luis F. Chiroque

Luis Felipe (Núñez) Chiroque has become a member of our team of PhD Students. He will commence work from October 2013 under the supervision of Antonio Fernández Anta, Research Associate Professor at the Institute. Prior to his incorporation to IMDEA Networks, Luis enrolled in an 8 month internship at the ‘Ericsson-Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) Chair on Software and Systems’, during which he tried out compilers for multithreaded applications. He also worked as a Research Assistant at the EUI-UPM (the School of Informatics at the Polytechnic University of Madrid) implementing ATM QoS protocols for network traffic simulation. Most recently he became a Research Engineer at IMDEA Networks working in the SOCAM research Project. During this period he developed his skills in Social Network Analysis, Big Data (Hadoop Framework) and Natural Language Processing. Luis F. Chiroque obtained his B.Sc. degree in Telematics Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Madrid. Currently, he is studying a Master’s Degree in Mathematical Engineering at University Carlos III of Madrid.

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