Investigating injury severity of pedestrian–vehicle crashes by integrating latent class cluster analysis and unbalanced panel mixed ordered probit model

Abstract In recent years the pedestrian deaths have been declining, but the pedestrian–vehicle death rate in Croatia is still pretty high. This study intended to investigate the injury severity of pedestrian–vehicle crashes and identify the influencing factors. To achieve this goal, the dataset was firstly collected from Traffic Accident Database System maintained by the Ministry of the Interior, Republic of Croatia from 2015 to 2019, and then latent cluster analysis was employed to identify homogenous clusters from heterogeneous dataset. Based on the classified dataset, unbalanced panel mixed ordered probit model was proposed. By analyzing the classes with different vehicles, the proposed model revealed a more complete understanding of significant variables and showed beneficial performance from the goodness-of-fit, while capturing the impact of exogenous variables to vary among different places, as well as accommodating the heterogeneity issue due to unobserved effects. Findings revealed that the proposed model can be considered as an alternative to determine the factors of injury severity and to deal with the heterogeneity issue. The results may provide potential insights for reducing the injury severity of pedestrian-vehicle crashes.