A new avenue to improve the performance of integrated modeling for flash flood susceptibility assessment: Applying cluster algorithms

Flash flood is one of the most severe natural disasters around the world, and has caused sizeable economic losses and countless death. Assessing flash flood susceptibility by hybrid models of statistical and machine learning methods is essential for flood mitigation strategies and disaster preparedness. Although classifying the flash flood conditioning factors becomes a crucial step before applying these hybrid models, their impact on the accuracy of integrated modeling is still unclear. Most previous studies used natural break classification (NBC) and quantile classification methods by default to conduct the classification, but more classification methods have not been tried. In this context, this study introduced three clustering algorithms of K-Means, Expectation Maximization, and ISOMaximum likelihood algorithm (ISOMax) into the classification of factors, and compared them to NBC and quantile classification. To test the impact of classification methods on integrated modeling, these classification results were applied into the construction of three hybrid models (i.e., the integrating of frequency ratio with support vector machines, random forest, and bayesian-regularization neural networks). Then, the accuracy of these hybrid models was evaluated by using ROC curves and statistical indicators. The classification results show that the clustering intervals in the same factor varied with classification algorithms. It can be found from the model performance evaluation results that different classification algorithms will lead to discrepancies in accuracy of integrated modeling. Compared to NBC, the ISOMax allows a better fitting and prediction ability of hybrid models in this study. The application of clustering algorithm provides a new perspective for improving the accuracy of integrated modeling