Flood susceptibility mapping and assessment using a novel deep learning model combining multilayer perceptron and autoencoder neural networks

Abstract Floods are one of the most destructive natural disasters causing financial damages and casualties every year worldwide. Recently, the combination of datadriven techniques with remote sensing (RS) and geographical information systems (GIS) has been widely used by researchers for flood susceptibility mapping. This study presents a novel hybrid model combining the multilayer perceptron (MLP) and autoencoder models to produce the susceptibility maps for two study areas located in Iran and India. For two cases, nine, and twelve factors were considered as the predictor variables for flood susceptibility mapping, respectively. The prediction capability of the proposed hybrid model was compared with that of the traditional MLP model through the area under the receiver operating characteristic (AUROC) criterion. The AUROC curve for the MLP and autoencoder-MLP models were, respectively, 75 and 90, 74 and 93% in the training phase and 60 and 91, 81 and 97% in the testing phase, for Iran and India cases, respectively. The results suggested that the hybrid autoencoder-MLP model outperformed the MLP model and, therefore, can be used as a powerful model in other studies for flood susceptibility mapping.