ENSEMBLING OF DECISION TREES, KNN, AND LOGISTIC REGRESSION WITH SOFT-VOTING METHOD FOR WILDFIRE SUSCEPTIBILITY MAPPING

Abstract. As a result of climate change, climatic catastrophes, such as wildfires, are likely to increase. Wildfires continue to occur frequently and spread with greater intensity due to extreme weather conditions. In recent years, explosive fire growths have been reported in the United States, Australia, and other parts of the world. A combination of climate change and human activity has caused the semi-arid forestry areas in Iran's northern provinces to become more desiccated, leading to an increase in wildfires. The accuracy of the resulting fire susceptibility maps (FSMs) will directly be related to the performance of the method classifier. In this study, we use an ensemble classifier to model the FSM for a selected forestry case study area in one of the northern provinces of this country. Therefore, FSM is generated based on established criteria using the ensemble model. With Decision Trees, K nearest neighbor, and Logistic Regression, the ensemble model was created using the soft-voting method. A forest fire inventory data is created based on data collected over five years using GPS and the MODIS thermal anomalies product for training and testing the applied approach. The K-fold method was used for validation, and the resulting FSM was validated using five accuracy assessment metrics. The best result from the area under the curve (AUC) yields 93% for fold 9, and the mean AUC for ten folds yields 88%.