Predicting the Forest Fire Duration Enriched with Meteorological Data Using Feature Construction Techniques

The spread of contemporary artificial intelligence technologies, particularly machine learning, has significantly enhanced the capacity to predict asymmetrical natural disasters. Wildfires constitute a prominent example, as machine learning can be employed to forecast not only their spatial extent but also their environmental and socio-economic impacts, propagation dynamics, symmetrical or asymmetrical patterns, and even their duration. Such predictive capabilities are of critical importance for effective wildfire management, as they inform the strategic allocation of material resources, and the optimal deployment of human personnel in the field. Beyond that, examination of symmetrical or asymmetrical patterns in fires helps us to understand the causes and dynamics of their spread. The necessity of leveraging machine learning tools has become imperative in our era, as climate change has disrupted traditional wildfire management models due to prolonged droughts, rising temperatures, asymmetrical patterns, and the increasing frequency of extreme weather events. For this reason, our research seeks to fully exploit the potential of Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Minimum Redundancy Maximum Relevance (MRMR), and Grammatical Evolution, both for constructing Artificial Features and for generating Neural Network Architectures. For this purpose, we utilized the highly detailed and publicly available symmetrical datasets provided by the Hellenic Fire Service for the years 2014–2021, which we further enriched with meteorological data, corresponding to the prevailing conditions at both the onset and the suppression of each wildfire event. The research concluded that the Feature Construction technique, using Grammatical Evolution, combines both symmetrical and asymmetrical conditions, and that weather phenomena may provide and outperform other methods in terms of stability and accuracy. Therefore, the asymmetric phenomenon in our research is defined as the unpredictable outcome of climate change (meteorological data) which prolongs the duration of forest fires over time. Specifically, in the model accuracy of wildfire duration using Feature Construction, the mean error was 8.25%, indicating an overall accuracy of 91.75%.