A knowledge-based decision support system to analyze the debris-flow problems at Chen-Yu-Lan River, Taiwan

Decision-making for the debris-flow management involves multiple decision-makers often with concerning geomorphological and hydraulic conditions. Spatial decision support systems (SDSS) can be developed to improve our understanding of the relations among the natural and socio-economic variables to the occurrence/non-occurrence samples of debris-flow. Accordingly, the goal of this study is to development a debris-flow decision support system to manage and monitor the debris-flows in Nan-Tou County, Taiwan. The present study, more specifically, combines a spatial information system with an advanced Data Mining technique to investigate the debris-flow problem. In the first stage, our spatial information system integrates remote sensing, DEM, and aerial photos as three different resources to generate our spatial database. Each of the geomorphological and hydraulic attributes are obtained automatically through our spatial database. Then, a Data Mining classifier (hybrid model of decision tree (D.T.) + support vector machine (S.V.M.)) will be used to analyze and resolve the classification of occurrence of debris-flow. The contribution of this study has found that watershed area and NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) are the crucial factors governing debris-flow by means of decision tree analysis. Further, the performance of prediction accuracy on testing samples through support vector machine is 73% which could be helpful for us to have better understanding of debris-flow problem.