Explainable Imbalance-Aware Spatiotemporal Learning for Traffic Accident Risk Prediction in Medan Metropolitan City

Rusmin Saragih (STMIK Kaputama, Medan, Indonesia)
Enda Ribka Meganta P (STMIK Kaputama, Medan, Indonesia)
Theodora MV Nainggolan (Universitas Sisingamangaraja XII Tapanuli, Indonesia)
Frans Ikorasaki (Universitas Putra Abadi Langkat, Medan, Indonesia)
Fithry Tahel (Universitas Budi Darma Medan, Indonesia)

JOURNAL OF ICT APLICATIONS AND SYSTEM
Vol 5 No 1 (2026): Journal of ICT Aplications and System

Traffic accident prediction in rapidly urbanizing metropolitan regions remains a critical challenge due to the complex interplay of spatiotemporal dynamics, severe class imbalance, and the opacity of predictive models that limits actionable policy interpretation. Existing approaches tend to address these challenges in isolation—deploying graph neural networks without imbalance correction, or applying oversampling without incorporating spatial context—thereby falling short of the comprehensive decision-support capability demanded by intelligent transportation systems. This paper presents a novel integrated framework, designated SLT-SHAP, that systematically unifies spatiotemporal graph convolutional learning, Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) applied exclusively to the training partition, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks for sequential temporal dependency modeling, a Transformer encoder for long-range contextual attention across hourly traffic sequences, and SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) for post-hoc model interpretability. The study employs a curated spatiotemporal dataset of 132,480 observations collected at hourly resolution across 48 administrative zones in Medan Metropolitan City, Indonesia, encompassing traffic, meteorological, infrastructural, and geospatial variables with an inherent accident class imbalance of 12.4%. Experimental results demonstrate that SLT-SHAP achieves an F1-score of 0.796, AUC-ROC of 0.963, AUPRC of 0.784, and Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) of 0.783, surpassing all baseline and ablation variants. Ablation analysis confirms that each component—graph construction, SMOTE, LSTM, and Transformer—contributes independently to performance. SHAP analysis identifies congestion index, hour of day, and average speed as the three most influential predictors, with spatial heatmapping delineating persistent high-risk zones. The proposed framework offers a replicable and interpretable decision-support architecture for urban road safety analytics in the Indonesian and broader Southeast Asian metropolitan context.