Modelling flood susceptibility based on deep learning coupling with ensemble learning models

Modelling flood susceptibility is an indirect way to reduce the loss from flood disaster. Now, flood susceptibility modelling based on data driven model is state-of-the-art method such as ensemble learning and deep learning. However, the effect of deep learning coupling with ensemble learning models in flood susceptibility modelling is still unknown. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to propose three deep learning coupling with ensemble learning models by combining the deep learning (DL) with Filtered Classifier (FC), Rotation forest (RF) and Random Subspace (RSS) and explore the effect of coupling method for modelling flood susceptibility. The key step of this paper is as following: firstly, a Dingnan County which is lied in the Jiangxi Province of China is chosen as a case study, single flood event point and random sampling method was applied to generate the flood and non-flood data, respectively, then frequency ratio was utilized to analyze the relationship between each influencing factor and flood occurrence, based on the value of VIF, Spearman's correlation and One R classifier, the result show that there is no multicollinearity between each influencing factor, ten influencing factors have contribution to the flood occurrence and all of them are applied to construct the coupling model. Finally, the DL, FC-DL, RF-DL and RSS-DL were applied to produce flood susceptibility maps. Then, several statistical indexes such as area under the curve (AUC), Kappa index, accuracy (ACC), and F-measure were used to assess the accomplishment of these coupling models. For the train data, the FC-DL model acquired the highest AUC value (0.996), followed by RF-DL (0.944), RSS-DL (0.934), and DL (0.934). For the validation data, the result showed that all models have a good accomplishment (AUC>0.8). In a word, the deep learning coupling with ensemble learning models demonstrates the more reliable and excellent performance. Hence, the proposed new method will help the government for land use planning and can be applied in other area around the world.