Machine Learning-Based Geospatial Flood Prediction: The Case of Brahmaputra Basin
摘要
India’s varied topology, geographic area of about 3.28 million sq. km, and diverse climates make it prone to frequent floods which affect millions of lives every year. Developing an efficient flood prediction system is the need of the hour to better predict natural disasters. A lot of research has been conducted in this domain, where solutions have majorly revolved around Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and remote sensing-based mapping, geospatial frequency ratio, statistical indexes, multi-criteria decision making, some machine learning methods, etc. But all of these solutions have lacked geospatial validation and scalability and also have neglected the complexities, class imbalances, and patterns present in the data. Thus, this research discusses Geospatial Flood Prediction, specifically focusing on the Brahmaputra region incorporating NetCDF data of geographical features and historical flood-related data. The model proposed focuses on data handling (normalization, handling outliers), data conversion (NetCDF to CSV) to ensure scalability and reliability and uses advanced machine learning algorithms like Multilayer Perceptron (MLP). This study helps not only in predictions but also in understanding the impact of various geographical factors like digital elevation, topographic wetness index (TWI), precipitation, etc. on the probability of flooding. The findings of the study tend to be in a positive direction with the model reaching an accuracy of almost 94% and suggesting that Filled Digital Elevation affects the probability of floods the most (correlation of 0.608). This model in the future could serve as a helping hand to disaster management agencies in predicting areas that are more prone to flooding so precautions can be taken timely to prevent any significant losses.