Collision prediction in roundabouts: a comparative study of extreme value theory approaches

This work contributes to study the application of extreme value theory (EVT) in road safety analysis, estimating the risk of being involved in an entering-circulating collision in single-lane roundabouts. Detailed trajectory data of the vehicles were derived from a driving simulator experiment, and the time-to-collision (TTC) was used as a surrogate measure of safety. Three EVT approaches were applied, tested and compared: (1) the Generalized Extreme Value distribution used in the block maxima (BM) approach, (2) the Generalized Pareto Distribution used in the peak-over-threshold approach (POT), with negated-TTC (nTTC), and (3) shifted-reciprocal-TTC (srTTC). Case-study results analysis showed that BM and POT with shifted-reciprocal-TTC confidence intervals included the number of observed crashes, while POT with negated-TTC did not include it. According to these findings, both BM and POT-with-shifted-reciprocal-TTC appear promising and deserve further attention in order to develop effective ready-to-practice crash prediction models, useful in intersection design and operational analysis.