The diaspora model for human migration.

Migration's impact spans various social dimensions, including demography, sustainability, politics, economy, and gender disparities. Yet, the decision-making process behind migrants choosing their destination remains elusive. Existing models primarily rely on population size and travel distance to explain the spatial patterns of migration flows, overlooking significant population heterogeneities. Paradoxically, migrants often travel long distances and to smaller destinations if their diaspora is present in those locations. To address this gap, we propose the diaspora model of migration, incorporating intensity (the number of people moving to a country), and assortativity (the destination within the country). Our model considers only the existing diaspora sizes in the destination country, influencing the probability of migrants selecting a specific residence. Despite its simplicity, our model accurately reproduces the observed stable flow and distribution of migration in Austria (postal code level) and US metropolitan areas, yielding precise estimates of migrant inflow at various geographic scales. Given the increase in international migrations, this study enlightens our understanding of migration flow heterogeneities, helping design more inclusive, integrated cities.

A comparison of statistical learning methods for deriving determining factors of accident occurrence from an imbalanced high resolution dataset.

One of the main aims of accident data analysis is to derive the determining factors associated with road traffic accident occurrence. While current studies mainly use variants of count data regression to achieve this aim, the problem can also be considered as a binary classification task, with the dichotomous target variable indicating events (accidents) and non-events (no accidents). The effects of 45 variables - describing road condition and geometry, traffic volume and regulations, weather, and accident time - are analyzed using a dataset in high temporal (1 h) and spatial (250 m) resolution, covering the whole highway network of Austria over the period of four consecutive years. A combination of synthetic minority oversampling and maximum dissimilarity undersampling is used to balance the training dataset. We employ and compare a series of statistical learning techniques with respect to their predictive performance and discuss the importance of determining factors of accident occurrence from the ensemble of models. Findings substantiate that a trade-off between accuracy and sensitivity is inherent to imbalanced classification problems. Results show satisfying performance of tree-based methods which exhibit accuracies between 75% and 90% while exhibiting sensitivities between 30% and 50%. Overall, this analysis emphasizes the merits of using high-resolution data in the context of accident analysis.

Methodological considerations with data uncertainty in road safety analysis.

The analysis of potential influencing factors that affect the likelihood of road accident occurrence has been of major interest for safety researchers throughout the recent decades. Even though steady methodological progresses were made over the years, several impediments pertaining to the statistical analysis of crash data remain. While issues related to methodological approaches have been subject to constructive discussion, uncertainties inherent to the most fundamental part of any analysis have been widely neglected: data. This paper scrutinizes data from various sources that are commonly used in road safety studies with respect to their actual suitability for applications in this area. Issues related to spatial and temporal aspects of data uncertainty are pointed out and their implications for road safety analysis are discussed in detail. These general methodological considerations are exemplary illustrated with data from Austria, providing suggestions and methods how to overcome these obstacles. Considering these aspects is of major importance for expediting further advances in road safety data analysis and thus for increasing road safety.