J.-P. Kreiss, T. Zangmeister

• In this paper we deal with dierent statistical modeling of real world accident data in order to quantify the eectiveness of a safety function or a safety conguration (meaning a specic combination of safety functions) in vehicles. It is shown that the eectiveness can be estimated along the so-called relative risk, even if the eectiveness does depend on a confounding variable which may be categorical or continuous. For doing so a concrete statistical modeling is not necessary, that is the resulting estimate is of nonparametric nature. In a second step the quite usual and from a statistical point of view classical logistic regression modeling is investigated. Main emphasis has been laid on the understanding of the model and the interpretation of the occurring parameters. It is shown that the eectiveness of the safety function also can be detected via such a logistic approach and that relevant confounding variables can and should be taken into account. The interpretation of the parameters related to the confounder and the quantication of the in uence of the confounder is shown to be rather problematic. All the theoretical results are illuminated by numerical data examples.