Highlights • Statistical – ANN hybrid approach for modeling pedestrian behavior. • Waiting time increases the odds of signal violation. • Sensitivity analysis to identify relative importance of variables. • Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) using Feed Forward Back Propagation (FFBP).

Abstract Traffic crashes at intersections are major hazard all over the world. The victims of road crashes are mostly pedestrians. A large share of accidents can be related to unsafe crossing behavior by pedestrians. The accidents are mostly fatal for pedestrians especially if the unsafe act is signal violation. This study primarily focused on cognizing factors which are significantly affecting the signal violation behavior of pedestrians’ at urban signalised intersections. Data is collected at 11 signalised intersections in New Delhi, India using video recording technique. Significant variables are identified using conventional statistics. The variables are then used as input neuron for the Artificial Neural Network (ANN) for modeling signal violation behavior. Sensitivity analysis is performed to identify the relative importance of factors related to the pedestrian signal violation. Host of different factors such as pedestrian demographic, behavioral attributes, crossing state and mobile usage are notably influencing signal violations. Pedestrian crossing speed, crossing path and waiting time are the top three predictors of violation behavior. The accuracy of ANN to predict signal violation behaviour is found to be about 85% and is considerably higher than conventional binary logistic regression (BLR) model. The area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC) is found to be 0.753, suggesting good model performance. The results suggest that ANN is a robust alternative to conventional regression, for studying and modeling pedestrian behavior. The findings from this study would assist engineers and policy makers to take proactive measures for designing pedestrian friendly facilities to reduce signal violations. This would ultimately improve pedestrian safety at urban signalised intersections.