Forest Fire Susceptibility Assessment and Mapping Using Support Vector Regression and Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System-Based Evolutionary Algorithms

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Support vector regression (SVR) and the adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) are two well-known and powerful artificial intelligence techniques which have been frequently used for hazard mapping. So far, a plethora of hybrid models have been developed using a combination of either the SVR or ANFIS and evolutionary algorithms, but there are only a handful of studies that compare the performance of these models when integrated with evolutionary algorithms, especially in forest fire susceptibility mapping (FFSM). The aim of this study was to compare performance of ANFIS-, and SVR-based evolutionary algorithms, namely, the genetic algorithm (GA) and the shuffled frog-leaping algorithm (SFLA) in FFSM in Ajloun Governorate in Jordan. Accordingly, four hybrid models, SVR-GA, SVR-SFLA, ANFIS-GA, and ANFIS-SFLA, were developed and compared. One hundred and one forest fire locations were used in this study to assess and model susceptibility of forests to fires. The forest fire inventory data were divided into a training data subset (70%) and a testing data subset (30%). Fourteen factors affecting incidence of forest fires were employed as conditioning factors. The area under the receiver operating characteristic (AUROC) curve was used to assess performance of the models in the validation phase. The results revealed that the SVR-based hybrid algorithms had better AUROC values than the ANFIS-based algorithms. Of the four integrated models, the SVR-GA model proved to be the model with the highest accuracy and best performance. It had AUROC values of 0.97 and 0.89 in the training and the testing phases, respectively.