A new machine learning framework for occupational accidents forecasting with safety inspections integration
This work addresses safety planning for decision-makers in occupational settings by converting routine inspection data into weekly risk scores, though it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a specific domain.
The authors tackled short-term occupational accident forecasting by integrating safety inspection data into a binary time series model, resulting in an LSTM network achieving a balanced accuracy of 0.86 for detecting high-risk periods.
We propose a generic framework for short-term occupational accident forecasting that leverages safety inspections and models accident occurrences as binary time series. The approach generates daily predictions, which are then aggregated into weekly safety assessments to better inform decision making. To ensure the reliability and operational applicability of the forecasts, we apply a sliding-window cross-validation procedure specifically designed for time series data, combined with an evaluation based on aggregated period-level metrics. Several machine learning algorithms, including logistic regression, tree-based models, and neural networks, are trained and systematically compared within this framework. Unlike the other approaches, the long short-term memory (LSTM) network outperforms the other approaches and detects the upcoming high-risk periods with a balanced accuracy of 0.86, confirming the robustness of our methodology and demonstrating that a binary time series model can anticipate these critical periods based on safety inspections. The proposed methodology converts routine safety inspection data into clear weekly risk scores, detecting the periods when accidents are most likely. Decision-makers can integrate these scores into their planning tools to classify inspection priorities, schedule targeted interventions, and funnel resources to the sites or shifts classified as highest risk, stepping in before incidents occur and getting the greatest return on safety investments.