Assessment of Trend and Seasonality in Road Accident Data: An Iranian Case Study

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Kerman Medical Students Research Center, Kerman University of Medical Sciences, Kerman, Iran

2 Research Center for Social Determinants of Health, Institute for Futures Studies in Health, Kerman University of Medical Sciences, Kerman, Iran

3 Research Center for Modeling in Health, Institute for Futures Studies in Health, Kerman University of Medical Sciences, Kerman, Iran

4 Regional Knowledge for HIV/AIDS Surveillance, Institute for Futures Studies in Health, Kerman University of Medical Sciences, Kerman, Iran

Abstract

Background
Road traffic accidents and their related deaths have become a major concern, particularly in developing countries. Iran has adopted a series of policies and interventions to control the high number of accidents occurring over the past few years. In this study we used a time series model to understand the trend of accidents, and ascertain the viability of applying ARIMA models on data from Taybad city.
 
Methods
This study is a cross-sectional study. We used data from accidents occurring in Taybad between 2007 and 2011. We obtained the data from the Ministry of Health (MOH) and used the time series method with a time lag of one month. After plotting the trend, non stationary data in mean and variance were removed using Box-Cox transformation and a differencing method respectively. The ACF and PACF plots were used to control the stationary situation.


Results
The traffic accidents in our study had an increasing trend over the five years of study. Based on ACF and PACF plots gained after applying Box-Cox transformation and differencing, data did not fit to a time series model. Therefore, neither ARIMA model nor seasonality were observed.


Conclusion
Traffic accidents in Taybad have an upward trend. In addition, we expected either the AR model, MA model or ARIMA model to have a seasonal trend, yet this was not observed in this analysis. Several reasons may have contributed to this situation, such as uncertainty of the quality of data, weather changes, and behavioural factors that are not taken into account by time series analysis.

Keywords

Main Subjects

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History

  • Receive Date: 12 April 2013
  • Revise Date: 09 May 2013
  • Accept Date: 06 May 2013
  • First Publish Date: 09 May 2013

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