Avaliação do problema da unidade de área modificável (puam) na taxa de acidentes de trânsito agregados em áreas

Abstract

Theobservation and evaluation of the effects of the Modifiable Area Unit Problem become an important issue in the Road Safety Performance modeling, because if the appropriate levels of geographic scale and configuration of the zones are not identified, the statistical modeling in spatial data may lead to misleading conclusions. The general objective of this work is to evaluate the influence of the Modifiable ArealUnit Problem (MAUP) on the frequency of traffic accidents in areas. The methodological steps defined for the course completion work are: i) Consolidation of the database of traffic accidents; ii) Spatial aggregation of data in different areas; (iii) Exploratory analysis (spatial and non-spatial)of aggregate data; iv) Comparison of the indicators resulting from the analyzes. Through the non-spatial analysis, it was noticed that the degree of correlation between variables increased as thelevel of aggregationraise. It was also observed that for the traffic accident rate,indicators, suchas averagealso suffer when there is a change in the configuration of the aggregation unit. Regardingto thespatial analysis, there is a pattern of increase of the spatial correlation for the accident rate the aggregation measure also increases, except for a configuration in traffic zones whichvalue decreases if compared to the previous aggregation volume. Finally, with a construction of the regression models that consider the spatial products of the global form (SARand SEM), it was noticed theincrease in theirpower of estimation with the increase of the level of aggregation.