Predicting wildfires in Algerian forests using machine learning models

Abstract

Algeria is one of the Maghreb countries most affected by wildfires. The economic, environmental, and societal consequences of these fires can last several years after the wildfire. Often, it is possible to avoid such disasters if the detection of the outbreak of fire is fast enough, reliable, and early. The lack of datasets has limited the methods used to predict wildfires in Algeria to the mapping risk areas, which is updated annually. This study is the result of the availability of a recent dataset relating the history of forest fires in the cities of Bejaia and Sidi Bel-Abbes during the year 2012. The dataset being small size, we used principal component analysis to reduce the number of variables to 6, while retaining 96.65% of the total variance. Moreover, we developed an artificial neural network (ANN) with two hidden layers to predict wildfires in these cities. Next, we trained and compared the performance of our classifier with those provided by the Logistic Regression, K Nearest Neighbors, Support Vector Machine, and Random Forest classifiers, using a 10-fold stratified cross-validation. The experiment shows a slight superiority of the ANN classifier compared to the others, in terms of accuracy, precision, and recall. Our classifier achieves an accuracy of 0.967 ± 0.026 and F1-score of 0.971 ± 0.023 . The SHAP technique revealed the importance of the features (RH, DC, ISI) in the predictions of the ANN model.