Determining Flood Zonation Maps, Using New Ensembles of Multi-Criteria Decision-Making, Bivariate Statistics, and Artificial Neural Network

Abstract

Golestan Province is one of the most vulnerable areas to catastrophic flood events in Iran. The flood severity in this region has grown dramatically during the last decades, demanding a major investigation. Accordingly, an authentic map providing detailed information on floods is required to reduce future flood disasters. Three ensemble models produced by the combination of Evaluation Based on Distance from Average Solution (EDAS) and Multilayer Perceptron Neural Network (MLP) with Frequency Ratio (FR), and Weights of Evidence (WOE) are used to quantify the map flood susceptibility in Golestan Province, in the north of Iran. Ten flood effective criteria, namely altitude, slope degree, slope aspect, plan curvature, distance from rivers, Topographic Wetness Index (TWI), rainfall, soil type, geology, and land use, are considered for the modeling process. The flood zonation maps are validated by the receiver operating curve (ROC). The results show that the most precise model is MLP-FR (AUROC = 0.912), followed by EDAS-FR-AHP (AUROC = 0.875), and EDAS-WOE-AHP (AUROC = 0.845). The high accuracies of all methods applied to illustrate their capability in predicting flood susceptibility in future studies.