“…In the public health area, application of Bayesian methods in disease mapping, risk assessment and prediction are numerous (Besag and Newell, 1991;Wakefield and Morris, 2001;Wakefield et al, 2000;Waller et al, 1997). The ability to incorporate prior knowledge without the restriction of classical distributional assumptions makes Bayesian inference a potent forecasting tool in a wide variety of fields (Withers, 2002). The Bayesian approaches, from empirical Bayes to full Bayes, were also implemented in some crash analysis studies to estimate crash risk and predict crash frequency (Brü de and Larsson, 1988;Hauer, 1992Hauer, , 2002Mountain et al, 1996).…”