A comparative spatial analysis of flood susceptibility mapping using boosting machine learning algorithms in Rathnapura, Sri Lanka

Abstract

Identifying flood‐prone areas is essential for preventing floods, reducing risks, and making informed decisions. A spatial database with 595 flood inventory and 13 flood predictors were used to implement five boosting algorithms: gradient boosting machine (GBM), extreme gradient boosting, categorical boosting, logit boost, and light gradient boosting machine (LGBM) to map flood susceptibility in Rathnapura while evaluating trained model's generalizing ability and assessing the feature importance in flood susceptibility mapping (FSM). The model performance was evaluated using the F1‐score, kappa index, and area under curve (AUC) method. The findings revealed that all the models were effective in identifying the overall flood susceptibility trends while LightGBM model had superior results (F1‐score = 0.907, Kappa value = 0.813 and AUC = 0.970), securing the top scores across all performance metrics compared to the other models (for testing dataset). Based on kappa evaluation, most of the models had finer performance (AUC min = 0.737) while LightGBM had moderate performance for predictions beyond the training region. According to the results, regions with lower altitudes and topographic roughness values, moderate rainfall, and proximity to rivers are more susceptible to flooding. This framework can be adapted for rapid FSM in data‐deficient regions.