Analysis and Modeling of Threatening Factors of Workforce’s Health in Large-Scale Workplaces: Comparison of Four-Fitting Methods to select optimum technique

INTRODUCTION Workforce is one of the pillars of development in any country. Therefore, the workforce's health is very important, and analyzing its threatening factors is one of the fundamental steps for health planning. This study was the first part of a comprehensive study aimed at comparing the fitting methods to analyze and model the factors threatening health in occupational injuries. METHODS In this study, 980 human occupational injuries in 10 Iranian large-scale workplaces within 10 years (2005-2014) were analyzed and modeled based on the four fitting methods: linear regression, regression analysis, generalized linear model, and artificial neural networks (ANN) using IBM SPSS Modeler 14.2. RESULTS Accident Severity Rate (ASR) of occupational injuries was 557.47 ± 397.87. The results showed that the mean of age and work experience of injured workers were 27.82 ± 5.23 and 4.39 ± 3.65 years, respectively. Analysis of health-threatening factors showed that some factors, including age, quality of provided H&S training, number of workers, hazard identification (HAZID), and periodic risk assessment, and periodic H&S training were important factors that affected ASR. In addition, the results of comparison of the four fitting methods showed that the correlation coefficient of ANN (R = 0.968) and the relative error (R.E) of ANN (R.E = 0.063) were the highest and lowest, respectively, among other fitting methods. CONCLUSION The findings of the present study indicated that, despite the suitability and effectiveness of all fitting methods in analyzing severity of occupational injuries, ANN is the best fitting method for modeling of the threatening factors of a workforce's health. Furthermore, all fitting methods, especially ANN, should be considered more in analyzing and modeling of occupational injuries and health-threatening factors as well as planning to provide and improve the workforce's health.