Reducing Traffic Mortality in the USA

While the rate of fatal road accidents has been decreasing steadily since the 80s, the past ten years have seen a stagnation in this reduction. Coupled with the increase in number of miles driven in the nation, the total number of traffic related-fatalities has now reached a ten year high and is rapidly increasing.

By looking at the demographics of traffic accident victims for each US state, we find that there is a lot of variation between states. Now we want to understand if there are patterns in this variation in order to derive suggestions for a policy action plan. In particular, instead of implementing a costly nation-wide plan we want to focus on groups of states with similar profiles. How can we find such groups in a statistically sound way and communicate the result effectively?