Modelling and forecasting occupational accidents of different severity levels in Spain

The control of accidents at the work place is a critical issue all over the world. The consequences of occupational accidents in terms of costs for the company in which the accidents take place is only one minor matter, being the social impact and the loss of human life the most controversial effects of this important problem. The methods used to forecast future evolution of accidents are often limited to trend estimations and projections, being the scientific literature on this topic rather scarce. This paper aims at showing and predicting the evolution of Spanish occupational accidents of different levels of severity, allowing the evaluation of the influence that preventive actions carried out by public administrations or private companies may have over the number of occupational accidents. Though some contributions may be found on this topic for Spain, this paper is the first contribution that forecast occupational accidents for different levels of severity using Multivariate Unobserved Components models developed in a State Space framework extended to deal with the irregular sampling interval of the data. Data from 1998 to 2009 have been used to test the efficacy of the forecasting system.