Flood hazard risk prediction and assessment of Guangdong Hong Kong Macao
Greater Bay Area based on random forest model
Abstract
Against the backdrop of global climate change and rapid urbanization,
climate disaster events are frequent. In highly urbanized areas, floods
pose the greatest threat and destruction. Therefore, evaluating and
predicting the risk distribution of flood disasters through appropriate
methods can minimize the loss and damage of disasters, which is of great
significance. In this study, based on the Random Forest (RF) algorithm,
a model is constructed to evaluate and predict a flood disaster process
in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) of China. We use
remote sensing (RS) images and GIS tools to extract the area submerged
by the flood when the disaster occur, select 15 risk indicators, create
221975 samples to train and test the model and obtain the importance of
each indicator to the prediction results. In addition, we select two
machine learning algorithm models for accuracy comparison with the RF
model. The results show that: (1) High flood areas are mainly
distributed in urban agglomerations in the central and southern parts of
GBA, including Guangzhou, Foshan, Dongguan, Shenzhen, Macau etc. (2)
Flood risk prediction and evaluation methods using RS and GIS, combined
with RF models, are easy to analyze the spatial pattern and influencing
factors of flood risk, and have good applicability. Compared with other
models, it has higher prediction accuracy and reliability. The
overfitting phenomenon is also not obvious. (3) The maximum 1/3/6/9 and
DEM elevation indicators are the most important five of the 15 risk
indicators, and the Relative Position Index (RPI) is the least
important, while other indicators are of general importance. This study
provides a new method for evaluating and predicting flood disaster
risks, and the evaluation results provide a reference for flood risk
management, prevention, reduction of life and property losses in the
study area.