The Annals of Applied Statistics

Causal inference in transportation safety studies: Comparison of potential outcomes and causal diagrams

Vishesh Karwa, Aleksandra B. Slavković, and Eric T. Donnell

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Abstract

The research questions that motivate transportation safety studies are causal in nature. Safety researchers typically use observational data to answer such questions, but often without appropriate causal inference methodology. The field of causal inference presents several modeling frameworks for probing empirical data to assess causal relations. This paper focuses on exploring the applicability of two such modeling frameworks—Causal Diagrams and Potential Outcomes—for a specific transportation safety problem. The causal effects of pavement marking retroreflectivity on safety of a road segment were estimated. More specifically, the results based on three different implementations of these frameworks on a real data set were compared: Inverse Propensity Score Weighting with regression adjustment and Propensity Score Matching with regression adjustment versus Causal Bayesian Network. The effect of increased pavement marking retroreflectivity was generally found to reduce the probability of target nighttime crashes. However, we found that the magnitude of the causal effects estimated are sensitive to the method used and to the assumptions being violated.

Article information

Source
Ann. Appl. Stat. Volume 5, Number 2B (2011), 1428-1455.

Dates
First available in Project Euclid: 13 July 2011

Permanent link to this document
http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.aoas/1310562728

Digital Object Identifier
doi:10.1214/10-AOAS440

Mathematical Reviews number (MathSciNet)
MR2849781

Zentralblatt MATH identifier
1223.62175

Keywords
Causal inference potential outcomes causal Bayesian networks observational studies transportation safety nighttime crash data

Citation

Karwa, Vishesh; Slavković, Aleksandra B.; Donnell, Eric T. Causal inference in transportation safety studies: Comparison of potential outcomes and causal diagrams. Ann. Appl. Stat. 5 (2011), no. 2B, 1428--1455. doi:10.1214/10-AOAS440. http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.aoas/1310562728.


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Supplemental materials

  • Supplementary material: Supplement to “Causal inference in transportation safety studies: Comparison of potential outcomes and causal diagrams”. This document contains additional details about the Matching and Inverse Propensity score estimators and the top ten graphs recovered by the graph learning algorithm.
    Digital Object Identifier: doi:10.1214/10-AOAS440SUPP
    Supplemental files available for subscribers.

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