Flooding and its relationship with land cover change, population growth, and road density

Bangladesh experiences frequent hydro-climatic disasters such as flooding. These disasters are believed to be associated with land use changes and climate variability. However, identifying the factors that lead to flooding is challenging. This study mapped flood susceptibility in the northeast region of Bangladesh using Bayesian regularization back propagation (BRBP) neural network, classification and regression trees (CART), a statistical model (STM) using the evidence belief function (EBF), and their ensemble models (EMs) for three time periods (2000, 2014, and 2017). The accuracy of machine learning algorithms (MLAs), STM, and EMs were assessed by considering the area under the curve—receiver operating characteristic (AUC-ROC). Evaluation of the accuracy levels of the aforementioned algorithms revealed that EM4 (BRBP-CART-EBF) outperformed (AUC > 90%) standalone and…