Affiliations 

  • 1 Department of Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur 50603, Malaysia
  • 2 Centre of Water Engineering Technology, Water Energy Section, Malaysia France Institute, Universiti Kuala Lumpur, Bangi 43650, Selangor, Malaysia
  • 3 Negeri Sembilan State Health Department, Seremban 70300, Negeri Sembilan, Malaysia
Int J Environ Res Public Health, 2022 Oct 27;19(21).
PMID: 36360843 DOI: 10.3390/ijerph192113962

Abstract

Forecasting the severity of occupational injuries shall be all industries' top priority. The use of machine learning is theoretically valuable to assist the predictive analysis, thus, this study attempts to propose a feature-optimized predictive model for anticipating occupational injury severity. A public database of 66,405 occupational injury records from OSHA is analyzed using five sets of machine learning models: Support Vector Machine, K-Nearest Neighbors, Naïve Bayes, Decision Tree, and Random Forest. For model comparison, Random Forest outperformed other models with higher accuracy and F1-score. Therefore, it highlighted the potential of ensemble learning as a more accurate prediction model in the field of occupational injury. In constructing the model, this study also proposed the feature optimization technique that revealed the three most important features; 'nature of injury', 'type of event', and 'affected body part' in developing model. The accuracy of the Random Forest model was improved by 0.5% or 0.895 and 0.954 for the prediction of hospitalization and amputation, respectively by redeveloping and optimizing the model with hyperparameter tuning. The feature optimization is essential in providing insight knowledge to the Safety and Health Practitioners for future injury corrective and preventive strategies. This study has shown promising potential for smart workplace surveillance.

* Title and MeSH Headings from MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.