Akrivi Varela, ”Event identification based on driving characteristics on rural roads”, Diploma Thesis, NTUA, School of Civil Engineering, Athens, July 2020.

The aim of this Diploma Thesis is to identify events based on driving characteristics on rural roads and determine the main factors that can describe the situation before and during an event. The data used were collected from a driving simulator experiment in rural roads. Fort the data analysis, binomial logistic regression, random forests, as well as factor analysis statistical models were developed, with dependent variable the occurrence of an event. Furthermore, factor analysis aimed at identifying groups of independent variables for the data describing the situation one minute before each event, the duration of the events and the combination of the two aforementioned situations. Results showed that random forest model performs much better than the binomial logistic regression in identifying event occurrence with very few false alarms. Moreover, speed and longitudinal acceleration along with total distance driven from the beginning of the driving session, turned out to better describe the case of driving one minute prior to an event. Finally, driving during an event can be sufficiently described through speed, the deviation of the vehicle from the middle of the road as well as the time headway with the vehicle ahead.