No abstract

Floods are one of the most destructive natural disasters, causing financial and human losses every year. As a result, reliable Flood Susceptibility Mapping (FSM) is required for effective flood management and reducing its harmful effects. In this study, a new machine learning model based on the Cascade Forest Model (CFM) was developed for FSM. Satellite imagery, historical reports, and field data were used to determine flood-inundated areas. The database included 21 flood-conditioning factors obtained from different sources. The performance of the proposed CFM was evaluated over two study areas, and the results were compared with those of other six machine learning methods, including Support Vector Machine (SVM), Decision Tree (DT), Random Forest (RF), Deep Neural Network (DNN), Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LightGBM), Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), and Categorical Boosting (CatBoost). The result showed CFM produced the highest accuracy compared to other models over both study areas. The Overall Accuracy (AC), Kappa Coefficient (KC), and Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUC) of the proposed model were more than 95%, 0.8, 0.95, respectively. Most of these models recognized the southwestern part of the Karun basin, northern and northwestern regions of the Gorganrud basin as susceptible areas.

Characterizing and identification of flood-susceptible areas can be a solution to mitigate the damages and fatality rate. This study proposes a novel hybrid MCDM framework to assess flood susceptibility in large ungauged watersheds dealing with data scarcity issues. The proposed method examines the interdependencies and causal relationships between various criteria affecting the flooding procedure using the DEcision-MAking Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL). Moreover, since experts' opinions contain uncertainty, the fuzzy logic is integrated with DEMATEL to overcome this shortcoming. Then, the local weights of criteria were estimated using the Best-Worst Method (BWM) to enhance the pairwise comparisons process. Final criteria weights were obtained using Fuzzy DEMATEL and BWM results in Analytical Network Process (ANP) super-matrix. Finally, the criteria were distributed spatially using the Complex Proportional Assessment of Alternatives (COPRAS) method based on obtained weights. The proposed method was compared with different approaches such as Fuzzy-DEMATEL ANP, BWM, and AHP using several statistical measures. We concluded that the novel hybrid proposed method outperformed other approaches based on our results. Moreover, by overlaying classified maps with the historical flood events locations, it was concluded that 85.96% of flooded areas were classified as "high" and "very high.

ABSTRACT. The prevalence of allergic diseases has highly increased in recent decades due to contamination of the environment with the allergy stimuli. A common treat is identifying the allergy stimulus, and then avoiding the patient to be exposed with it. There are, however, many unknown allergic diseases stimuli that are related to the characteristics of the living environment. In this article, we focus on the effect of air pollution on asthmatic allergies and investigate the association between prevalence of such allergies with those characteristics of the environment that may affect the air pollution. This investigation, eventually, leads to map the vulnerability of asthmatic allergy prevalence based on environmental characteristics. For this, spatial association rule mining has been deployed to mine the association between spatial distribution of allergy prevalence and the air pollution parameters such as CO, SO2, NO2, PM10, PM2.5, and O3 (compiled by the air pollution monitoring stations) as well as living distance to parks and roads. The categories of attributes have been defined as fuzzy sets in order to handle the data uncertainty. The results for the case study (i.e., Tehran metropolitan area) indicates that distance to parks and roads as well as CO, NO2, PM10, and PM2.5 is related to the allergy prevalence in December (the most polluted month of the year in Tehran), while SO2 and O3 have no effect on that. In June, however, the distance to parks and roads as well as NO2, PM10, and PM2.5 affect the allergy prevalence, but CO, SO2 and O3 are ineffective.

No abstract