Statistical Analysis of Road Accidents Fatality in Ghana Using Poisson Regression

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Date
2012
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Abstract
Road accident in this country is known to be the second major cause of death after malaria and it is reported that there is an average of 1909 people who are killed by road accidents annually. The most dangerous part of it is that about 60% of these people who die through road accidents are within the ages of 16 and 45 years-the labour force of the country. The ultimate goal of this thesis is to use Poisson regression to fit a model to the secondary data which was obtained from the Building and Road Research Institute of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research on the number of people killed by road accidents in Ghana from 2001-2010, given the type of vehicle which was involved in the accident, the ages of those who were killed, the day that the accident which killed the people occurred and time (in years). The results of the Poisson analysis showed that there was over dispersion in the data. Negative binomial regression analysis was therefore used to validate the Poisson regression model. It was clear that the negative binomial regression model was the best fit for the data. It was observed from the result that in general the number of people killed in road accidents gradually increases with time (as the years go by, the number of people killed by road accidents increases). The type of vehicle involved in an accident was found to be associated with the number of people expected to be killed in the accident with cars and buses as the type that killed most people and heavy duty vehicles such as bulldozer and trucks which were classified as “others” killed the least people in accidents. The day an accident occurred affected the expected number of people killed in that accident because it was identified that Saturday had the highest number of people killed in road accidents. Finally, the age of a person involved in road accident could determine as to whether one would be killed. The results showed that people in the age group of 16-25 were mostly killed in road accidents.  
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A Thesis submitted to the School of Graduate Studies, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Philosophy
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