A novel emergency situation awareness machine learning approach to assess flood disaster risk based on Chinese Weibo

Abstract

Social media emerged as an important resource of information to improve the emergency situation awareness of flooding disasters. However, the online microblog text stream is unstructured and unbalanced obviously. Given the big, real-time, and noisy flood disaster microblog text flow, a new regional emergency situation awareness model to automatic assess flood disaster risk is proposed. Firstly, according to the established online disaster event-meta frame, a multi-label classification algorithm for the flood microbloggings is constructed based on the historical dataset. This algorithm helps to assign the relevant event-meta tags to each situation microbloggings. Second, a new machine learning method for dynamic assessment of flood risk for online microbloggings is developed. The flood event-metas are considered to be feature vectors, and the four different levels of flood risk are considered to be four classes. Then, the flood risk assessment task is innovatively transformed into a multi-classification task. By the logistic regression ordered multi-classification algorithm, the dynamic quantitative evaluation of event-meta, users and regional risks is realized. Finally, the proposed model is applied in the case of the Yuyao Flood. The results of the case study show that the Yuyao Flood’s online quantitative risk assessment results are consistent with real accumulated precipitation data, which illustrate that the proposed machine learning model could realize the bottom-up automatic disaster information collecting by processing victim user-generated content effectively. Social media is proven to supplement the deficiencies of traditional disaster statistics and provide real-time, scientific information support for the implementation of flood emergency processes.