Efficient forest fire occurrence prediction for developing countries using two weather parameters

• Published in: Engineering applications of artificial intelligence 2011-08, Vol.24 (5), p.888-894
• Main Authors: Sakr, George E., Elhajj, Imad H., Mitri, George
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Artificial intelligence; Artificial neural networks; Climatology; Expert systems; Feature Reduction; Fires; Forest fire occurrence prediction; Forest fires; Neural networks; Risk; Support vector machines; Weather; Weather data
• ISSN: 0952-1976; 1873-6769
• DOI: 10.1016/j.engappai.2011.02.017

Forest fire occurrence prediction plays a major role in resource allocation, mitigation and recovery efforts. This paper compares two artificial intelligence based methods, artificial neural networks (ANN) and support vector machines (SVM), utilizing a reduced set of weather parameters. Using a reduced set of parameters results in an efficient and reduced cost prediction system especially for developing countries. In this paper the aim is to predict forest fire occurrence by reducing the number of monitored features, and eliminating the need for weather prediction mechanisms. The reason is to reduce errors due to inaccuracies in weather prediction. The challenge is to choose a limited number of easily measurable features in the aim of reducing the cost of the system and its maintenance. At the same time, the chosen features must have a high correlation with the risk of fire occurrence. A literature review of forest fire prediction methods divided into systems/indices, and artificial intelligence is provided. The two fire danger prediction algorithms utilize relative humidity and cumulative precipitation to output a risk estimate. The assessment of these algorithms, using data from Lebanon, demonstrated their ability to accurately predict the risk of fire occurrence on a scale of four levels.