Novel integrated modelling based on multiplicative long short-term memory (mLSTM) deep learning model and ensemble multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) models for mapping flood risk.

Flood risk assessment is a key step in flood management and mitigation, and flood risk maps provide a quantitative measure of flood risk. Therefore, integration of deep learning - an updated version of machine learning techniques - and multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) models can generate high-resolution flood risk maps. In this study, a novel integrated approach has been developed based on multiplicative long short-term memory (mLSTM) deep learning models and an MCDM ensemble model to map flood risk in the Minab-Shamil plain, southern Iran. A flood hazard map generated by the mLSTM model is based on nine critical features selected by GrootCV (distance to the river, vegetation cover, variables extracted from DEM (digital elevation model) and river density) and a flood inventory map (70% and 30% data were randomly selected as training and test datasets, respectively). The values of all criteria used to assess model accuracy performance (except Cohens kappa for train dataset = 86, and for test dataset = 84) achieved values greater than 90, which indicates that the mLSTM model performed very well for the generation of a spatial flood hazard map. According to the spatial flood hazard map produced by mLSTM, the very low, low, moderate, high and very high classes cover 26%, 35.3%, 20.5%, 11.2% and 7% of the total area, respectively. Flood vulnerability maps were produced by the combinative distance-based assessment (CODAS), the evaluation based on distance from average solution (EDAS), and the multi-objective optimization on the basis of simple ratio analysis (MOOSRA), and then validated by Spearman's rank correlation coefficients (SRC). Based on the SRC, the three models CODAS, EDAS, and MOOSRA showed high-ranking correlations with each other, and all three models were then used in the ensemble process. According to the CODAS-EDAS-MOOSRA ensemble model, 21.5%, 34.2%, 23.7%, 13%, and 7.6% of the total area were classified as having a very low to very high flood vulnerability, respectively. Finally, a flood risk map was generated by the combination of flood hazard and vulnerability maps produced by the mLSTM and MCDM ensemble model. According to the flood risk map, 27.4%, 34.3%, 14.8%, 15.7%, and 7.8% of the total area were classified as having a very low, low, moderate, high, and very high flood risk, respectively. Overall, the integration of mLSTM and the MCDM ensemble is a promising tool for generating precise flood risk maps and provides a useful reference for flood risk management.