Identifying Incident Causal Factors to Improve Aviation Transportation Safety: Proposing a Deep Learning Approach
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Aviation is a complicated transportation system, and safety is of paramount importance because aircraft failure often involves casualties. Prevention is clearly the best strategy for aviation transportation safety. Learning from past incident data to prevent potential accidents from happening has proved to be a successful approach. To prevent potential safety hazards and make effective prevention plans, aviation safety experts identify primary and contributing factors from incident reports. However, safety experts’ review processes have become prohibitively expensive nowadays. The number of incident reports is increasing rapidly due to the acceleration of advances in information technologies and the growth of the commercial and private aviation transportation industries. Consequently, advanced text mining algorithms should be applied to help aviation safety experts facilitate the process of incident data extraction. This paper focuses on constructing deep-learning-based models to identify causal factors from incident reports. First, we prepare the data sets used for training, validation, and testing with approximately 200,000 qualified incident reports from the Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS). Then, we take an open-source natural language model, which is well trained with a large corpus of Wikipedia texts, as the baseline and fine-tune it with the texts in incident reports to make it more suited to our specific research task. Finally, we build and train an attention-based long short-term memory (LSTM) model to identify primary and contributing factors in each incident report. The solution we propose has multilabel capability and is automated and customizable, and it is more accurate and adaptable than traditional machine learning methods in extant research. This novel application of deep learning algorithms to the incident reporting system can efficiently improve aviation safety.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".