Statistical Risk and Performance Analyses on Naturalistic Driving Trajectory Datasets for Traffic Modeling

The development of autonomous driving technology has made simulation testing one of the most important tools for evaluating system performance. However, there is a lack of systematic methods for analyzing and assessing naturalistic driving trajectory datasets. Specifically, there is a lack of comprehensive analyses on data diversity and balance in machine learning-oriented research. This study presents a comprehensive assessment of existing highway scenario datasets in the context of traffic modeling in autonomous driving simulation tests. In order to clarify the level of traffic risk, we design a systematic risk index and propose an index describing the degree of data scatter based on the principle of Euclidean distance quantization. By comparing several datasets, including NGSIM, highD, INTERACTION, CitySim, and our self-collected Highway dataset, we find that the proposed metrics can effectively quantify the risk level of the dataset while helping to gain insight into the diversity and balance differences of the dataset.