English

Global Flood Prediction: a Multimodal Machine Learning Approach

Machine Learning 2023-01-31 v1 Computers and Society

Abstract

Flooding is one of the most destructive and costly natural disasters, and climate changes would further increase risks globally. This work presents a novel multimodal machine learning approach for multi-year global flood risk prediction, combining geographical information and historical natural disaster dataset. Our multimodal framework employs state-of-the-art processing techniques to extract embeddings from each data modality, including text-based geographical data and tabular-based time-series data. Experiments demonstrate that a multimodal approach, that is combining text and statistical data, outperforms a single-modality approach. Our most advanced architecture, employing embeddings extracted using transfer learning upon DistilBert model, achieves 75\%-77\% ROCAUC score in predicting the next 1-5 year flooding event in historically flooded locations. This work demonstrates the potentials of using machine learning for long-term planning in natural disaster management.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2301.12548,
  title  = {Global Flood Prediction: a Multimodal Machine Learning Approach},
  author = {Cynthia Zeng and Dimitris Bertsimas},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.12548},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

6 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-28T08:25:39.690Z