Flood Hazard Rating Prediction for Urban Areas Using Random Forest and LSTM

Abstract

A flood hazard rating prediction model was developed that is based on a long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network and random forest. The target area was Samseong District in Seoul, which has a history of severe flooding. The Storm Water Management Model was used to generate training data for the LSTM model to predict the total overflow as the rainfall input data. Two-dimensional numerical analysis was performed to calculate inundation and flow velocity maps for training the random forest, which was used to generate a map of the predicted flood hazard rating of grid units given the total accumulative overflow of the target area. To confirm the goodness of fit, the proposed model was used to predict a flood hazard rating map for a rainfall event observed on July 27, 2011. The prediction accuracy for the flood hazard rating of each grid was 99.86% when the debris factor was considered and 99.99% when the debris factor was not considered.