Flash-flood susceptibility mapping: a novel credal decision tree-based ensemble approaches

Escalation in flash floods and the enhanced devastations, especially in the arid and semiarid regions of the world has required precise mapping of the flash flood susceptible zones. In this study, we applied six novel credal decision tree (CDT)-based ensemble models—1. CDT, 2. CDT Alternative Decision Tree (ADTree), 3. CDT- Reduced Error Pruning Tree (REPT), 4. CDT- Rotational Forest (RF), 5. CDT-FT, 6. CDT- Naïve Bias Tree (NBTree). For preparing the flash flood susceptibility maps (FFSM), 206 flood locations were selected in the Neka-roud watershed of Iran with 70% as training data and 30% as testing data. Moreover, 18 flood conditing factors were considered for FFSM and a multi-colinearity test was performed for determining the role of the factors. Our results show that the distance from the stream plays a vital role in flash floods. The CDT-FT is the best-fit model out of the six novel algorithms employed in this study as demonstrated by the highest values of the area under the curve (AUC) of the receiver operating curve (ROC) (AUROC 0.986 for training data and 0.981 for testing data). Our study provides a novel approach and useful tool for flood management.