A data-driven rule-based system for China’s traffic accident prediction by considering the improvement of safety efficiency

•A hybrid model regarding safety efficiency evaluation and traffic accident prediction is proposed for the first time.•Meta-frontier and group-frontier are considered to improve the reasonability of the proposed hybrid model.•The efficiency is used together with historical data to construct EBRBS to predict the future number of traffic accidents.•Experimental results in China transportation management demonstrate the proposed model.