Identifying Regional Driving Risks via Transductive Cross-City Transfer Learning Under Negative Transfer

Identifying regional driving risks is important for real-world applications such as driving safety warning applications, public safety management, and insurance company premium pricing. Previous approaches are either based on traffic accident reports or vehicular sensor data. They either fail to identify potential risks, such as near-miss collisions, which would need other important measurements (e.g., hard break, acceleration, etc.), or fail to generalize to cities without vehicular sensor data, severely limiting their practicality. In this work, we address these two challenges and successfully identify regional driving risks in a target city without vehicular sensor data via cross-city transfer learning. Specifically, we design a novel framework RiskTrans by optimizing both the predictor and the relationship between cities to achieve transfer learning. We advance the existing works from two aspects: (i) we achieve it in a transductive manner without accessing labeled data in the target cities; (ii) we identify and address the problem of negative transfer in cross-city transfer learning, a prominent issue that is often (surprisingly) neglected in previous works. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments based on data collected from 175 thousand vehicles in six cities. The results show RiskTrans outperforms baselines by at least 50.2% and reduces negative transfer by 49.4%.