Predicting the Frequency of Marine Accidents by Navigators’ Watch Duty Time in South Korea Using LSTM

Despite the development of advanced technology, marine accidents have not decreased. To prevent marine accidents, it is necessary to predict accidents in advance. With the recent development of artificial intelligence (AI), AI technologies such as deep learning have been applied to create and analyze predictive models in various fields. The purpose of this study is to develop a model for predicting the frequency of marine accidents using a long-short term memory (LSTM) network. In this study, a prediction model was developed using marine accidents from 1981 to 2019, and the proposed model was evaluated by predicting the accidents in 2020. As a result, we found that marine accidents mainly occurred during the third officer’s duty time, representing that the accidents are highly related to the navigator’s experience. In addition, the proposed LSTM model performed reliably to predict the frequency of marine accidents with a small mean absolute percentage error (best MAPE: 0.059) that outperformed a traditional statistical method (i.e, ARIMA). This study could help us build LSTM structures for marine accident prediction and could be used as primary data to prevent the accidents by predicting the number of marine accidents by the navigator’s watch duty time.