Accident-Analyzer: 🚗 🗺️ Understanding Vehicle Accident Patterns in the United States

In this project, we reimagine CrimAnalyzer– a visualization assisted analytic tool for crimes in Sao Paulo– in the con- text of traffic accidents, ultimately producing Accident-Analyzer. In doing so, we explore the spatio-temporal patterns of traffic accidents across the United States from 2016 to 2021. The Accident-Analyzer system will allow users to identify local hotspots, visualize accident trends over time, and filter the data by key categories in real-time. Our goals in this project were to best recreate the analytic tool proposed in the CrimAnalyzer paper, as well as extend its capabilities to the US Accidents dataset, a collection of approximately 2.8 million car accidents covering 49 US states.

Authors

• Kyle Otstot (@kotstot6)
• Shreyash Gade (@shreyash1112)
• Jaswanth Reddy Tokala (@jaswanth1999)
• Anudeep Reddy Dasari (@anudeep-dasari)
• Hruthik Reddy Sunnapu (@hruthik-reddy)
• Nitesh Valluru (@vallurunitesh)

Tech Stack

Client: D3.js (v7), Leaflet.js, Pyodide

Server: PHP, MySQL

Screenshots

Demo

A simple demonstration of the system can be found here.

Run Locally

Move to project directory, and clone the project

  cd /path/to/project

  git clone https://link-to-project

Download the CSV data here, and add it to the data directory of the project.

Install MySQL, and set the password for root. Add it to php/credentials.php

  $password = "<YOUR-MYSQL-ROOT-PASSWORD>";

Then run MySQL on terminal. For example, the MacOS command would be

  /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql -h localhost -u root -p --local_infile

Create a database with the following commands

  CREATE DATABASE us_accidents_database;
  USE us_accidents_database;

Create a table with the following command

  CREATE TABLE us_accidents (
      Timestamp datetime,
      Year int,
      Month int,
      Day int,
      Time_of_Day int,
      Day_of_Week int,
      Duration int,
      Distance float,
      County int,
      State int,
      Cloudy int,
      Rain int,
      Snow int,
      Precipitation int,
      Thunder int,
      Visibility int
  );

Then add the CSV data to the table

  SET GLOBAL local_infile = true;
  LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE '/path/to/project/data/us_accidents.csv'
  INTO TABLE us_accidents
  FIELDS TERMINATED BY ','
  ENCLOSED BY '"'
  LINES TERMINATED BY '\n'
  IGNORE 1 ROWS;

If successful, 2845341 rows should have been added.

Now install PHP and run the following commands

  cd /path/to/project

  php -S localhost:8080

Lastly, enter localhost:8080 into your browser (e.g., Chrome) and the visualization should appear.

Note: If MySQLi errors are given, make sure that (insert mysqli term) these two commands(extension=mysqli and extension_dir="ext") are uncommented in the php.ini file. Furthermore, if the PHP execution times out, try adjusting (increase the max_execution_time and max_input_time) in the php.ini file. Also if you are using php 5.3 and above you may need to rename the 'php.ini-production' file to 'php.ini'

References

Garcıa, Germain and Silveira, Jaqueline and Poco, Jorge and Paiva, Afonso and Nery, Marcelo Batista and Silva, Claudio T. and Adorno, Sérgio and Nonato, Luis Gustavo, CrimAnalyzer: Understanding Crime Patterns in São Paulo. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2021