Applicability of mixed effect model in the prediction of forest fire

Abstract

Fire is an important influencing factor in forest ecosystems. Establishing an accurate forest fire forecasting model is important for forest fire management. We used different meteorological factors as predictors to construct a forest fire prediction model in Fujian Province, based on Logistic regression and generalized linear mixed effect model. We compared the fitness and prediction accuracy of the two models, judged the applicability of the mixed effect model in forest fire forecasting. The results showed that the AUC and accuracy values of the Logistic base model were 0.664 and 60.4%, respectively. Models considering random effects gave better fitting and validating statistics. Among them, the two-level mixed model containing both area and altitude difference effects performed best, with increases of 0.057 and 6.0% for the AUC and accuracy values, respectively. By applying the model to predict the probability of forest fires in Fujian Province, we found that the middle-incidence and high-incidence areas of forest fires distributed in northwest and south Fujian, whereas the low-incidence areas of forest fires distributed in southwest and east Fujian, which was consistent with the observed data. The data fitting and forest fire prediction of the mixed effects model was better than those of the Logistic basic model. Therefore, it could be used as an important tool for forest fire prediction and management.