Evaluating the Impact of Recursive Feature Elimination on Machine Learning Models for Predicting Forest Fire-Prone Zones

This study aimed to enhance the accuracy of forest fire susceptibility mapping (FSM) by innovatively applying recursive feature elimination (RFE) with an ensemble of machine learning models, specifically Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Random Forest (RF), to identify key fire factors. The fire zones were derived from MODIS satellite imagery from 2012 to 2017. Further validation of these data has been provided by field surveys and reviews of land records in rangelands and forests; a total of 326 fire points were determined in this study. Seventeen factors involving topography, geomorphology, meteorology, hydrology, and human factors were identified as being effective primary factors in triggering and spreading fires in the selected mountainous case study area. As a first step, the RFE models RF, Extra Trees, Gradient Boosting, and AdaBoost were used to identify important fire factors among all selected primary factors. The SVM and RF models were applied once on all factors and secondly on those derived from the RFE model as the key factors in FSM. Training and testing data were divided tenfold, and the model’s performance was evaluated using cross-validation. Various metrics, including recall, precision, F1 score, accuracy, area under the curve (AUC), Matthew’s correlation coefficient (MCC), and Kappa, were employed to measure the performance of the models. The assessments demonstrate that leveraging RFE models enhances the FSM results by identifying key factors and excluding unnecessary ones. Notably, the SVM model exhibits significant improvement, achieving an increase of over 10.97% in accuracy and 8.61% in AUC metrics. This improvement underscores the effectiveness of the RFE approach in enhancing the predictive performance of the SVM model.