A Comparative Study of Genetic Algorithm-Based Ensemble Models and Knowledge-Based Models for Wildfire Susceptibility Mapping

Wildfire susceptibility mapping (WSM) plays a crucial role in identifying areas with heightened vulnerability to forest fires, allowing for proactive measures in fire prevention, management, and resource allocation, ultimately leading to more effective fire control and mitigation strategies. This paper describes our undertaking to develop and compare the performance of two knowledge-based models, namely the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and the technique for order performance by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS), as well as two novel genetic algorithm (GA)-based ensemble data-driven models: boosting and random subspace. The objective was to map susceptibility to forest fires in the Northern Mazar District in Jordan. The ensemble models were constructed using four well-known classifiers: decision tree (DT), support vector machine (SVM), k-nearest neighbors (kNN), and naive Bayes (NB) algorithms. This study utilized seventy forest fire locations and twelve influential factors to build and evaluate the models. To identify the optimal features for constructing the data-driven models, a GA-based wrapper method and four machine learning models were applied. During the validation phase, the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROCC) values for the single SVM, single NB, single DT, single kNN, GA-based boosting, GA-based random subspace, FR-AHP, and AHP-TOPSIS models were found to be 85.3%, 85.9%, 73.8%, 88.7%, 95.0%, 95.0%, 74.0%, and 65.4% respectively. The results indicated that the GA-based ensemble models outperformed both the single machine learning models and the knowledge-based techniques in terms of performance. The developed models in this study can be effectively utilized in various management and decision-making processes aimed at mitigating forest fire risks and enhancing fire control strategies.