EM Approach for Weibull Analysis in a Strongly Censored Data Context - Application to Road Markings
Résumé
Road surface markings organize road traffic and therefore play a major role in road safety. This is one reason why a part of the current guidance system is to model traffic lanes based on pavement marking detection. Consequently, road managers must guarantee detectable marking lines. An adapted maintenance strategy is a potential solution. Today, marking lines are inspected periodically. A direct consequence of this is that the failure moment of a given marking is generally strongly censored (left, interval or right). Sathyanarayanan et al. present the first Weibull approach for road markings [1]. Weibull distributions are estimated by the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) method adapted to this censored problem. The MLE is computed by a numerical approach such as the Newton-Raphson algorithm. In the context of interval-censored data, Pradhan and Kundu proposed an alternative method based on an Expectation-Maximisation EM algorithm [2]. This paper proposes replacing this EM approach in the road markings context. A case study regarding the broken center line of a section of French National Road 4 illustrates this methodology. Lifetime markings are distributed by the Weibull distribution.