Improving Urban Flood Prediction using LSTM-DeepLabv3+ and Bayesian Optimization with Spatiotemporal feature fusion

Deep learning models have become increasingly popular for flood prediction due to their superior accuracy and efficiency compared to traditional methods. However, current machine learning methods often rely on separate spatial or temporal feature analysis and have limitations on the types, number, and dimensions of input data. This study presented a CNN-RNN hybrid feature fusion modelling approach for urban flood prediction, which integrated the strengths of CNNs in processing spatial features and RNNs in analyzing different dimensions of time sequences. This approach allowed for both static and dynamic flood predictions. Bayesian optimization was applied to identify the seven most influential flood-driven factors and determine the best combination strategy. By combining four CNNs (FCN, UNet, SegNet, DeepLabv3+) and three RNNs (LSTM, BiLSTM, GRU), the optimal hybrid model was identified as LSTM-DeepLabv3+. This model achieved the highest prediction accuracy (MAE, RMSE, NSE, and KGE were 0.007, 0.025, 0.973 and 0.755, respectively) under various rainfall input conditions. Additionally, the processing speed was significantly improved, with an inference time of 1.158s (approximately 1/125 of the traditional computation time) compared to the physically-based models.