Real-Time Driver Safety Scoring Through Inverse Crash Probability Modeling

TL;DR

SafeDriver-IQ transforms binary crash prediction models into continuous safety scores, enabling real-time, interpretable risk assessment for driver safety and infrastructure planning.

Contribution

Introduces a novel framework that converts crash classifiers into continuous safety scores by integrating crash data, driving scenarios, and domain knowledge.

Findings

87% of crashes involve multiple risk factors with non-linear effects.

SafeDriver-IQ reliably distinguishes high-risk from low-risk driving conditions.

Framework provides proactive safety insights for ADAS, fleet management, and urban planning.

Abstract

Road crashes remain a leading cause of preventable fatalities. Existing prediction models predominantly produce binary outcomes, which offer limited actionable insights for real-time driver feedback. These approaches often lack continuous risk quantification, interpretability, and explicit consideration of vulnerable road users (VRUs), such as pedestrians and cyclists. This research introduces SafeDriver-IQ, a framework that transforms binary crash classifiers into continuous 0-100 safety scores by combining national crash statistics with naturalistic driving data from autonomous vehicles. The framework fuses National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) crash records with Waymo Open Motion Dataset scenarios, engineers domain-informed features, and incorporates a calibration layer grounded in transportation safety literature. Evaluation across 15 complementary analyses indicates that the framework reliably differentiates high-risk from low-risk driving conditions with strong discriminative performance. Findings further reveal that 87% of crashes involve multiple co-occurring risk factors, with non-linear compounding effects that increase the risk to 4.5x baseline. SafeDriver-IQ delivers proactive, explainable safety intelligence relevant to advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS), fleet management, and urban infrastructure planning. This framework shifts the focus from reactive crash counting to real-time risk prevention.