Department of Statistics, The Ohio State University
Statistics and Biostatistics Colloquium Series

A primary goal of the Ohio State Highway Patrol (OSHP) is to develop and implement strategies for reducing the number of injury and fatal vehicle crashes on Ohio highways. In order to help OSHP effectively allocate its resources to reduce crash rates, the Statistical Consulting Service (SCS) constructed a statistical model to forecast crash rates on all interstates, US routes, and state routes throughout Ohio. Data for the model were primarily drawn from Department of Public Safety crash databases and GIS roadway files. Exploration of these data revealed some consistent patterns that could be exploited for efficient modeling in addition to some weaknesses in the data, such as miscoded and missing data, that needed to be accounted for in modeling. Ultimately, a series of ordinary Poisson regression models were fitted to the data using resources from the Ohio Supercomputing Center. One final challenge of the project was to develop a tool for presenting the massive model output in a format that end users could readily understand. This challenge was met by integrating model output with a dynamic visualization system, Google Earth.

Meet the speaker in Room 212 Cockins Hall at 4:30 p.m. Refreshments will be served.