Temporal Dynamics and Explainable Risk Factors of Traffic Fatalities: A Large-Scale Study Using PRF Brazil Data (2020-2024)
This study utilizes a large-scale dataset from the Brazilian Federal Highway Police (2020–2024) to demonstrate that a cost-sensitive LightGBM model, validated through rigorous temporal splitting and SHAP-based interpretability, outperforms other ensemble methods in predicting traffic fatalities while identifying key risk factors to inform proactive safety policies.