Driver Behavior Under Traffic Complexity: Variance Decomposition and Cross-Driver Generalization for Driver Monitoring

Lukas Köning, Nataša Miličić, Klaus Bogenberger

Understanding why a traffic situation is demanding for the human driver is central to safe and comfortable partially automated driving. Existing complexity metrics characterize only external environmental factors, while driver monitoring systems detect only endogenous states such as distraction. Neither side captures how external demands translate into driver-perceived situational load. Driver behavior serves as the natural bridge between both, and this paper investigates the inverse inference problem of estimating traffic complexity from behavioral signals. A systematic screening of 175 behavioral features across five domains (gaze, head pose, longitudinal control, guiding fixation, scanning strategy) is applied to data from 20 drivers in real urban traffic. Of these, 31 features exhibit statistically confirmed complexity effects, while 140 are confirmed as null effects through equivalence testing. Mixed-effects variance decomposition reveals that complexity explains only 1.5% of behavioral variance, whereas driver identity accounts for 23% and residual variance for 75%. This unfavorable ratio explains both the failure of all eight evaluated feature-level personalization strategies and the convergence of four classification architectures at F1 around 0.45 under leave-one-subject-out cross-validation. Guiding fixation rate emerges as the single most deployment-ready feature, combining speed-robustness, universality across drivers, and minimal inter-driver variation in complexity sensitivity. The results define three deployment regimes for complexity-adaptive advanced driver assistance systems and establish the variance structure as the primary bottleneck for complexity estimation.