Abstract
It has been recognized that wildfire, followed by large precipitation events, triggers both flooding and debris flows in mountainous regions. The ability to predict and mitigate these hazards is crucial in protecting public safety and infrastructure. A need for advanced modeling techniques was highlighted by re-evaluating existing prediction models from the literature. Data from 15 individual burn basins in the intermountain western United States, which contained 388 instances and 26 variables, were obtained from the United States Geological Survey (USGS). After randomly selecting a subset of the data to serve as a validation set, advanced predictive modeling techniques, using machine learning, were implemented using the remaining training data. Tenfold cross-validation was applied to the training data to ensure nearly unbiased error estimation and also to avoid model over-fitting. Linear, nonlinear, and rule-based predictive models including naïve Bayes, mixture discriminant analysis, classification trees, and logistic regression models were developed and tested on the validation dataset. Results for the new non-linear approaches were nearly twice as successful as those for the linear models, previously published in debris flow prediction literature. The new prediction models advance the current state-of-the-art of debris flow prediction and improve the ability to accurately predict debris flow events in wildfire-prone intermountain western United States.
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Acknowledgements
This project was funded by the US Department of Transportation (USDOT) through the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology. The authors would also like to thank the following individuals for their contributions to the work described: Caesar Singh, USDOT program manager, and Susan Cannon for providing data and necessary guidance.
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Disclaimer: The views, opinions, findings, and conclusions reflected in this paper are the responsibility of the authors only and do not represent the official policy or position of the USDOT/OST-R or any State or other entity.
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Kern, A.N., Addison, P., Oommen, T. et al. Machine Learning Based Predictive Modeling of Debris Flow Probability Following Wildfire in the Intermountain Western United States. Math Geosci 49, 717–735 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11004-017-9681-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11004-017-9681-2