Temporary prediction of the number of fatalities due to traffic accidents in Texas in the context of a random probabilistic walk
Description
Background: Road traffic injuries are currently considered as an epidemic given the burden of morbimortality that is reported worldwide by this cause, which makes mandatory to forecast its behavior. Considering the above, it is seek to confirm the predictive capacity of a method that predicts the value of fatalities due to traffic accident lesions applied in the context of Texas, USA for the year 2015 by means of a probabilistic random walk; Methods: Texas’ annual number of fatalities from road traffic injuries reported by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) were analyzed in analogy to the probabilistic random walk to obtain a prediction for 2015; Results: it was observed that the behavior of this variable is compatible with the one analyzed by probabilistic random walk, which allowed to apply this methodology and obtain a prediction for 2015 with a success of 96.3 % with respect to the official value reported; Conclusions: probabilistic random walk predicts the behavior of apparently random variables along time with high precision, which allows to apply this method as a public health surveillance tool by complementarily evaluating the effectiveness of interventions to reduce the fatalities from road traffic injuries.
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Texas’ annual number of fatalities from road traffic injuries reported by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) were analyzed in analogy to the probabilistic random walk to obtain a prediction for 2015