Leveraging GIS-based AHP, remote sensing, and machine learning for susceptibility assessment of different flood types in peshawar, Pakistan.

Abstract

Due to its diverse topography, Pakistan faces different types of floods each year, which cause substantial physical, environmental, and socioeconomic damage. However, the susceptibility of specific regions to different flood types remains unexplored. To the best of our knowledge for the first time, this study employed an integrated approach by leveraging a GIS-based Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), remote sensing, and machine learning (ML) algorithms, to assess susceptibility to three different types of flooding in Peshawar, Pakistan. The study first evaluated the degree of susceptibility to riverine, urban, and flash floods using the GIS-based AHP technique, and then employed ML models, (i.e., specifically Random Forest [RF] and Extreme Gradient Boosting [XG-Boost] to analyze multi-type flood susceptibility in the study region. The performance of the ML models was also evaluated, and the XG-Boost model outperforms RF, demonstrating a higher correlation coefficient (R2=0.561-0.922) and lower mean absolute error (MAE=0.042-0.354), and root-mean-square error (RMSE=0.119-0.415) for both training and testing datasets. The superior performance of the XG-Boost was further confirmed by the higher value of the area under the curve (AUC) values, which is relatively higher (0.87) than that of the AHP (0.70) and RF (0.86) models. Based on the relative best performance, the XG-Boost model was chosen for further susceptibility assessment of different types of floods, and the generated flood susceptibility maps revealed that 20.9% of the total area is susceptible to riverine flooding, while 30.27% and 48.68% of the total area is susceptible to urban and flash flooding, respectively. The study's findings are significant, offering valuable insights for relevant stakeholders in guiding future flood risk management and sustainable land use plans in the study area.