Examining the nonparametric effect of drivers’ age in rear-end accidents through an additive logistic regression model

•We inspect the nonparametric characteristics in connecting age to accidents risks.•The analysis uses observations in inherently matched pairs.•Driving performances of young and old drivers are more sensitive with age.•Female drivers and male drivers behave differently in rear-end accidents.•The pre-crash actions of leading vehicles affect the pattern of age impact. This study seeks to inspect the nonparametric characteristics connecting the age of the driver to the relative risk of being an at-fault vehicle, in order to discover a more precise and smooth pattern of age impact, which has commonly been neglected in past studies. Records of drivers in two-vehicle rear-end collisions are selected from the general estimates system (GES) 2011 dataset. These extracted observations in fact constitute inherently matched driver pairs under certain matching variables including weather conditions, pavement conditions and road geometry design characteristics that are shared by pairs of drivers in rear-end accidents. The introduced data structure is able to guarantee that the variance of the response variable will not depend on the matching variables and hence provides a high power of statistical modeling. The estimation results exhibit a smooth cubic spline function for examining the nonlinear relationship between the age of the driver and the log odds of being at fault in a rear-end accident. The results are presented with respect to the main effect of age, the interaction effect between age and sex, and the effects of age under different scenarios of pre-crash actions by the leading vehicle. Compared to the conventional specification in which age is categorized into several predefined groups, the proposed method is more flexible and able to produce quantitatively explicit results. First, it confirms the U-shaped pattern of the age effect, and further shows that the risks of young and old drivers change rapidly with age. Second, the interaction effects between age and sex show that female and male drivers behave differently in rear-end accidents. Third, it is found that the pattern of age impact varies according to the type of pre-crash actions exhibited by the leading vehicle.