In order to improve the prediction precision of the safety performance function （SPF） of freeway basic segments, design and crash data of 640 segments are collected from different institutions. Three negative binomial （NB） regression models and three generalized negative binomial （GNB） regression models are built to prove that the interactive influence of explanatory variables plays an important role in fitting goodness. The effective use of the GNB model in analyzing the interactive influence of explanatory variables and predicting freeway basic segments is demonstrated. Among six models, the two models （one is the NB model and the other is the GNB model. ） which consider the interactive influence of the annual average daily traffic （AADT） and length are more reasonable for predicting results. Furthermore, a comprehensive study is carried out to prove that when considering the interactive influence, the NB and GNB models have almost the same fitting performance in estimating the crashes, among which the GNB model is slightly better for prediction performance.
