Identifying the Causes of Ship Collisions Accident Using Text Mining and Bayesian Networks

Under the backdrop of the robust growth of the global economy, the water transport industry is experiencing rapid development, resulting in an increase in ship collisions and a critical water traffic safety situation. This study uses text mining techniques to gather a corpus of data. The corpus includes human factors, ship factors, natural environmental factors, and management factors, which are used as target data to obtain a high-dimensional sparse original feature vector space set comprising eigenvalues and eigenvalue weight attributes. Chi-square statistics are utilised to reduce dimensionality, resulting in a final set of 33-dimensional text feature items that determine the causal factors of ship collision risk. Taking the four steps involved in the collision process as the primary focus, a Bayesian network structure for ship collision risk is constructed based on the “human-ship-environment-management” system. By incorporating existing ship collision accident/danger reports, conditional probability tables are computed for each node in the Bayesian network structure, enabling the modelling of ship collision risk. The model is validated through an example, revealing that, under relevant conditions, the probability of collision exceeds 90 %. This finding demonstrates the validity of the model and allows one to deduce the primary cause of ship collision accidents.