Novel Bayesian Additive Regression Tree Methodology for Flood Susceptibility Modeling

Saeid Janizadeh,Zoran Kapelan,Naghmeh Mobarghaee Dinan,Mehdi Vafakhah

doi:10.1007/s11269-021-02972-7

Abstract

Identifying areas prone to flooding is a key step in flood risk management. The purpose of this study is to develop and present a novel flood susceptibility model based on Bayesian Additive Regression Tree (BART) methodology. The predictive performance of the new model is assessed via comparison with the Naïve Bayes (NB) and Random Forest (RF) based methods that were previously published in the literature. All models were tested on a real case study based in the Kan watershed in Iran. The following fifteen climatic and geo-environmental variables were used as inputs into all flood susceptibility models: altitude, aspect, slope, plan curvature, profile curvature, drainage density, distance from river distance from road, stream power index (SPI), topographic wetness index (TPI), topographic position index (TPI), curve number (CN), land use, lithology and rainfall. Based on the existing flood field survey and other information available for the analyzed area, a total of 118 flood locations were identified as potentially prone to flooding. The data available were divided into two groups with 70% used for training and 30% for validation of all models. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve parameters were used to evaluate the predictive accuracy of the new and existing models. Based on the area under curve (AUC) the new BART (86%) model outperformed the NB (80%) and RF (85%) models. Regarding the importance of input variables, the results obtained showed that the location’s altitude and distance from the river are the most important variables for assessing flooding susceptibility.

Highlights

Any unforeseen natural occurrence and, in the event of an emergency that weakens or destroys economic, social and physical capacity, such as loss of life and finances, destruction of infrastructure, economic resources and areas of employment, is defined as a natural disaster, highlights include earthquakes, floods, drought, seawater, volcanoes, landslides, hurricanes and natural pests (Vetrivel et al 2018)
The purpose of this study is to develop and present a novel flood susceptibility model based on Bayesian Additive Regression Tree (BART) methodology
The predictive performance of new model is assessed via comparison with the Naïve Bayes (NB) and Random Forest (RF) based methods that were previously published in the literature

Summary

Introduction

Any unforeseen natural occurrence and, in the event of an emergency that weakens or destroys economic, social and physical capacity, such as loss of life and finances, destruction of infrastructure, economic resources and areas of employment, is defined as a natural disaster, highlights include earthquakes, floods, drought, seawater, volcanoes, landslides, hurricanes and natural pests (Vetrivel et al 2018). Flooding as one of the major natural disasters that have occurred is very important in terms of economic losses and serious humanitarian concerns, in other words, the flood phenomenon is one of the most dynamic and disruptive natural events that put human life and property and social and economic conditions at greater risk than any other natural disaster (Rahmati et al 2016; Yariyan et al 2020). Seven important flood events were recorded in this watershed, causing damage to industrial, residential, agricultural land use, and fatalities, according to the available information

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