A Classification Model for Predicting the Injured Body Part in Construction Accidents in Korea

It is difficult to predict industrial accidents in the construction industry because many accident factors, such as human-related factors and environment-related factors, affect the accidents. Many studies have analyzed the severity of injuries and types of accidents; however, there were few studies on the prediction of injured body parts. This study aims to develop a classification model to predict the part of the injured body based on accident-related factors. Construction accident cases from June 2018 to July 2021 provided by the Korea Construction Safety Management Integrated Information were collected through web crawling and then preprocessed. A naïve Bayes classifier, one of the supervised learning algorithms, was employed to construct a classification model of the injured body part, which has four categories: 1) torso, 2) upper extremity, 3) head, and 4) lower extremity. The predictor variables are accident type, type of work, facility type, injury source, and activity type. As a result, the average accuracy for each injured body part was 50.4%. The accuracy of the upper extremity and lower extremity was relatively higher than the cases of the torso and head. Unlike the other classifications, such as spam mail filtering, a naïve Bayes classifier does not provide a good classification performance in construction accidents. The reasons are discussed in the study. Based on the results of this study, more detailed guidelines for construction safety management can be provided, which help establish safety measures at the construction site.