Driving maneuver classification from time series data: a rule based machine learning approach

Drivers’ improper driving behavior plays a vital role in road accidents. Different approaches have been proposed to classify and evaluate driving performance to ensure road safety. However, most of the techniques are based on neural networks which work like a black box and make the logical reasoning behind the classification decision unclear. In this paper, we propose a rule-based machine learning technique using a sequential covering algorithm to classify the driving maneuvers from time-series data. In the sequential covering algorithm, the impact of each rule is measured as the metrics of coverage and accuracy, where the coverage and accuracy indicate the amount of covered and correctly identified instances in a maneuver class, respectively. The final ruleset for each maneuver class is formed with only the significant rules. In this way, the rules are learned in an unsupervised manner and only the best performance of the rules are included in the ruleset. The set of rules is also optimized by pruning based on the performance of the test data. Application of the proposed system is beneficial compared to the traditional machine learning and deep learning approaches which typically require a larger dataset and higher computational time and complexity.