Forecasting road accidental deaths in India: an explicit comparison between ARIMA and exponential smoothing method

Abstract

The number of deaths due to road accident is increasing day by day and has become an alarming global problem over the decades. India, with her rising motorization is no stranger to this global catastrophe. In this paper two relatively simple yet powerful and versatile techniques for forecasting time series data, autoregressive integrated moving average method (ARIMA) and exponential smoothing method are used to forecast the number of deaths due to road accidents in India from the year 2022–2031. The results based on the two methods are compared and it is found that they are in sync with each other and pre-existing literature. Furthermore, this is a unique attempt to use two time series analysis techniques on the same data and carry out a comparative analysis. The data was collected from the annual report of Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, India (2020) and Accidental Deaths & Suicides in India (ADSI) Report of National Crime Record Bureau (2021). After examining all the probable models, it is observed that ARIMA (2, 2, 2) model and exponential smoothing (M, A, N) model are suitable for the given data. Amongst the two, ARIMA (2, 2, 2) model has a lower AIC and BIC value. Thus, this comes out to be the best model as per our model selection criterion. Further, the study also reveals an upward trend of number of road accidental deaths for the upcoming 10 years in India.

Keywords:

• Road accident deaths
• ARIMA
• Exponential smoothing
• Damped trend
• Forecasting
• AIC
• BIC

Acknowledgements

We would like to extend our gratitude towards the Ministry of Road transport and Highways, India, and National Crime Records Bureau of India for furnishing the data for road accident deaths in India on public domain. In addition to this we appreciate the Editor and Reviewer’s suggestions to improve this paper earnestly.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in Road Accidents in India, report by Ministry of Road Transportation and Highways, Govt. of India (MoRTH, 2010 & 2020) and Accidental Deaths & Suicides in India, report by Ministry of Home Affairs, Govt. of India (ADSI, 2021).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.