Journal of Hydrology 470–471 (2012) 302–315

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Journal of Hydrology
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jhydrol

Classifiers for the detection of flood-prone areas using remote sensed elevation data
Massimiliano Degiorgis, Giorgio Gnecco, Silvia Gorni, Giorgio Roth ⇑, Marcello Sanguineti,
Angela Celeste Taramasso
University of Genoa, Genoa, Italy

a r t i c l e i n f o s u m m a r y

Article history: A technique is presented for the identification of the areas subject to flooding hazard. Starting from
Received 31 May 2012 remote sensed elevation data and existing flood hazard maps – usually available for limited areas –
Received in revised form 9 August 2012 the relationships between selected quantitative morphologic features and the flooding hazard are first
Accepted 3 September 2012
identified and then used to extend the hazard information to the entire catchment. This is performed
Available online 11 September 2012
This manuscript was handled by Corrado
through techniques of pattern classification, such as linear classifiers based on quantitative morphologic
Corradini, Editor-in-Chief, with the features, and support vector machines with linear and Gaussian kernels. The experiment starts by dis-
assistance of Magdeline Laba, Associate criminating between flood-prone areas and marginal hazard areas. Multiclass classifiers are subsequently
Editor used to graduate the hazard. Their designs amount to solving suitable optimization problems. Several
performance measures are considered in comparing the different classifiers, such as the area under the
Keywords: receiver operating characteristics curve, and the sum of the false positive and false negative rates.
Flood hazard The procedure has been validated for the Tanaro basin, a tributary to the major Italian river, the Po.
Flood risk management Results show a high reliability: the classifier properly identifies 93% of flood-prone areas, and only 14%
Receiver operating characteristics of the areas subject to a marginal hazard are improperly assigned. An increase of this latter value up
Linear classifiers and support-vector to 19% is detected when the same structure is applied for hazard graduation. Results derived from the
machines
application to different catchments seem to qualitatively indicate the ability of the classifier to perform
Parameter optimization
well also outside the calibration region.
Shuttle radar topography mission
Pattern classification techniques should be considered when the identification of flood-prone areas and
hazard grading is required for large regions (e.g., for civil protection or insurance purposes) or when a
first identification is needed (e.g., to address further detailed flood-mapping activities).
Ó 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
Flooding is one of the most significant natural risks. Its impact
concerns almost all the components of global communities, inde-
pendently from their geographic location and their social and eco-
nomic structures. The mapping of the hazard component of the
flooding risk is frequently identified as the basic element on which
risk mitigation strategies should be developed. Consequently,
many countries regulate hazard and risk mapping by law. In
1973 the Congress of the United States of America, through the
Flood Disaster Protection Act (Pub. L. No. 93-234; 87 Stat. 975), rec-
ognized the relevance of the flooding hazard and called for the
identification of floodplain areas and related hazard areas. More re-
cently, in 2007, the European Commission, through the Flood
Directive (2007/60/EC), requires European Union member states
to produce flood hazard and flood risk maps. While adverse effects
on asset values, people and the environment should in perspective
⇑ Corresponding author. Address: University of Genoa, Via Montallegro 1, Genoa
16145, Italy. Tel.: +39 0103532486; fax: +39 0103532546.
E-mail address: giorgio.roth@unige.it (G. Roth).
be included in the analysis (de Moel et al., 2009; Ghizzoni et al.,
2010, 2012), the still limited availability of flood-prone and haz-
ard-grading maps require an effort to be directed toward the com-
pletion of this knowledge.
Flood hazard maps constitute the result of a modeling chain
that usually starts from the collection of historical information
about past flood events, which allows for the first recognition of
potentially hazardous reaches and river sections. A hydrologic
analysis is then performed to define flow peak discharges and re-
lated hydrographs for assigned return periods. Those are the input
for hydraulic flow propagation models, which allow for the
description of water levels along the reaches under examination.
While hydrologic analyses usually involve the availability of rele-
vant discharge time series, the hydraulic analysis requires the
knowledge of both river channel geometry and pertinent charac-
teristics, such as the surface roughness and boundary conditions.
At this stage, critical sections for the given return periods can be
identified. They constitute the starting point of the modeling of
the inundation process over the floodplains. A variety of different
models can be assumed to represent the involved physical pro-
cesses, and the choice of the right model depends upon both the

0022-1694/$ - see front matter Ó 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2012.09.006
 M. Degiorgis et al. / Journal of Hydrology 470–471 (2012) 302–315
characteristics of the physical system under analysis and the accu-
racy of the expected results (Guzzetti et al., 2005; Horritt and
Bates, 2002; Hunter et al., 2007).
The above outlined procedure is well established and able to
accurately recognize flood-prone areas down to the scale of the
single building. On the other hand, it is expensive and time con-
suming; moreover, it requires information not readily available
for all areas. For all these reasons, even in developed countries,
the complete mapping of flood-prone areas is far from being
achieved.
The development and processing of Digital Elevation Models
(DEMs) is a subject of increasing interest for a number of environ-
mental disciplines. Consequently, the availability of new technolo-
gies to measure surface elevation (e.g., GPS, SAR, SAR
interferometry, radar and laser altimetry) has made more attrac-
tive the application of DEM-based models. Moreover, in recent
years the DEM-based automatic characterization of hydrological
and morphological features (e.g. drainage area, stream channels,
valley bottoms, and floodplain identification) has become a prac-
tice for hydrologists and geomorphologists, substituting time-con-
suming manual procedures (Bates et al., 2003; Dodov and
Foufoula-Georgiou, 2005; Gallant and Dowling, 2003; Giannoni
et al., 2005, 2008; Manfreda et al., 2011; Nardi et al., 2006, 2008;
Noman et al., 2001). Among global elevation sources, in the follow-
ing reference is made to HydroSHEDS (Hydrological data and maps
based on SHuttle Elevation Derivatives at multiple Scales; see Leh-
ner et al. (2008) for technical information), based on the NASA
Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM).
In the present contribution, a possible approach is delineated
for flood-prone areas identification and hazard grading from Basin
Authorities and remote sensed elevation datasets. For the purpose,
a number of DEM-derived quantitative morphologic features were
selected: local slope, contributing area, site elevation and distance
from the potential source of flooding, and surface concavity. On the
other hand, flood hazard maps provided by Basin Authorities, and
available for limited portions of the basin area, complete the data-
set for the calibration of relationships between the selected mor-
phologic features and the flooding hazard. Once these
relationships are identified and calibrated, the extension of the
hazard information to the entire catchment can be performed. This
is achieved through techniques of pattern classification such as the
use of linear classifiers based on one or two of the morphologic
Fig. 1. Tanaro basin: location map (a) and hillshaded representation of the SRTM dataset (b).
303
features, and of Support Vector Machines (SVMs) with linear and
Gaussian kernels (Franc and Hlávač, 2004; Vapnik, 1998). The
experiments have been made first by discriminating between
flood-prone areas and marginal hazard areas, then multiclass clas-
sifiers have been used for hazard graduation. For the purpose of the
present paper, a marginal hazard level is introduced: it distin-
guishes areas that are subject to the flood hazard with a return
time greater than that used to identify flood-prone areas.
This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the Tanaro
case-study area. Section 3 introduces the elevation dataset and the
methods used to prune the drainage network, i.e. the source of the
flood hazard. The marginal hazard concept is presented in Section 4
together with a simple procedure able to identify areas that are
subject to this hazard level. Section 5 describes the selected mor-
phological features, i.e. those for which the relation with the flood-
ing hazard is to be evaluated. Performance measures are
intensively used to identify the best classifier and to validate the
procedure. They are introduced in Section 6. Linear classifiers
and SVM with linear and Gaussian kernels are presented in Sec-
tions 7 and 8, respectively. A procedure for hazard graduation in
recognized flood-prone areas is delineated in Section 9. Finally,
Section 10 presents the application and validation of the procedure
with reference to the Tanaro case study as well as the qualitative
validation performed within portions of the Tevere, the Dora Baltea
and the Quirra catchments (Italy). Section 11 is a brief conclusive
section. To make the paper self contained, an appendix on basic re-
sults from Statistical Learning Theory is included.
2. The Tanaro basin case study
Tanaro is a 276 km-long river in North-western Italy (Fig. 1). It
rises in the Ligurian Alps, close to the border with France and is the
most significant right-side tributary to the Po River in terms of
length, drainage area (partly Alpine and partly Apennine) and dis-
charge. At its junction with the Po River, the Tanaro drains about
8000 km2, 500 km2 of which are in mountainous terrain. Major
tributaries are the Stura di Demonte (contributing area
1430 km2), Alto Tanaro (1840 km2), Belbo (480 km2), Bormida
(1640 km2) and Orba (840 km2). Morphological variability allows
for the identification of three main zones with characteristic
behaviors. The mountain part, with an average 6% slope, very steep
304 M. Degiorgis et al. / Journal of Hydrology 470–471 (2012) 302–315
catchments and deep river beds; the mild part, with an average 1%
slope, shallower river beds and mildly steep catchments; finally,
the alluvial part, characterized by very low slope values. Unique
among the Po right-side tributaries, the river has an Alpine origin.
Nevertheless, the Ligurian Alps have a not high enough altitude,
and are located too close to the sea, to allow for the formation of
snow fields or glaciers large enough to provide a steady source of
water during the dry summer season. Furthermore, the Alpine
zone forms only a part of the basin drained by the Tanaro. The dis-
charge is therefore subject to a great deal of variation, and the sea-
sonal regime of the river is more typical of an Apennine torrent,
with maximum discharges in spring and autumn and a very small
flow rate in summer. The river is highly prone to flooding. During
the last two centuries, the Tanaro basin was affected by floods on
136 occasions, the most devastating being that of November
1994, when the whole of the river valley was affected by severe
flooding (Marchi et al., 1996; Luino, 2002). Due to these character-
istics, the Tanaro was selected as case study for the design of risk
scenarios for the flooding hazard (Ghizzoni et al., 2010).
Fig. 1 incorporates a hillshaded representation of the Tanaro ba-
sin elevation data. The DEM used in this study to describe the
Fig. 2. Summary of the Po Basin Authority studies for the Tanaro basin: drainage
network (a), flood-prone areas (b) and hazard graduation (c). Red, yellow and blue
respectively indicate high, medium and low hazard areas. (For interpretation of the
references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of
this article.)
drainage basin surface is derived from the NASA SRTM mission
with a 3 arc-seconds resolution. For the study area, this corre-
sponds to a DEM grid size of about 85  85 m. While this resolu-
tion is far from allowing for the recognition of flood control
structures – such as levees, dikes and weirs – it is accurate enough
to describe the local terrain morphology (a discussion on the influ-
ence of DEM source and grid size on the delineation of flood-prone
areas is provided in Manfreda et al. (2011)).
Fig. 2 depicts the Po Basin Authority results relevant to the pres-
ent study (www.adbpo.it). Panel (a) shows the portion of the drain-
age network for which hydrologic and hydraulic studies were
performed to define flood-prone areas and hazard graduation. Pa-
nel (b) shows the areas that are recognized as subject to possible
floods produced by the reaches that constitute the network in Pa-
nel (a). Panel (c) shows, within flood-prone areas, the hazard grad-
uation. The flooding hazard is graduated in three classes: high,
medium, and low.
From Fig. 2, one could realize that the work needed to complete
the knowledge of the flooding hazard for the Tanaro basin is far
from being finished. When analyzing the hazard for an element lo-
cated outside recognized flood-prone areas, i.e., within the gray
areas in Fig. 2c, this incomplete knowledge presents severe draw-
backs. In fact, since many non-studied tributaries are present, each
location in the catchment seems to be potentially subject to the
flooding hazard.
3. Drainage network as the hazard source
In the context of the present work, streams constitute the
source of the hazard. Within a given drainage basin, the hazard is
known when flood-prone areas and hazard grading are available
for all the streams that constitute its drainage network. The first
step is therefore to define a reference drainage network, which
should include all major streams, their tributaries, and sub-tribu-
taries down to a certain limit below which one could expect that
no relevant inundation process could be generated. The way in
which such limit is identified depends on the specific application
for which flood maps are produced. For the purpose of the present
work, the extension of the network will be fixed in terms of catch-
ment drainage density, Dd, defined as the ratio of the total drainage
network length to the basin area.
Elevation data were obtained from HydroSHEDS (hydro-
sheds.cr.usgs.gov/index.php). The HydroSHEDS database offers
hydrologic-related information at both regional and global scales
in a format compatible with GIS applications. These include, e.g.,
drainage directions and networks, water divides, and contributing
areas. For the aim of the present study, the Void-filled (DEM–VOID)
and the Hydrologically conditioned (DEM–CON) elevation models
are utilized. Both DEMs are derived from SRTM data. In DEM–VOID
missing data-points are filled and main elevation inconsistencies
removed. DEM–CON is further conditioned to produce a coherent
drainage, one in which the spatial location of the DEM derived
drainage network match its actual position (detailed specifications
are provided in hydrosheds.cr.usgs.gov/datasets.php).
Finally, one could note that conditioning procedures modify ele-
vation data. This limits the use of the DEM–CON to drainage net-
work identification procedures. Quantitative measures of
morphologic characteristics involving elevation data, e.g., local
slope or elevation difference between points, have therefore been
derived from DEM–VOID data. This dataset has been chosen for
its completeness and, for sake of generality of the proposed proce-
dure, used without alterations. However, one could notice that dif-
ferent procedures, potentially able to modify results, can be
adopted to remove DEMs inconsistencies (for a discussion on these
topics see Santini et al., 2009).
 M. Degiorgis et al. / Journal of Hydrology 470–471 (2012) 302–315
Fig. 3. Reference drainage network of the Tanaro basin. Streams studied by the Po
Basin Authority are depicted in dark-blue. (For interpretation of the references to
color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)
Different methods allow for the identification of the drainage
network from a DEM (see, e.g., Band, 1986; Giannoni et al., 2005;
O’Callaghan and Mark, 1984; Rodriguez-Iturbe and Rinaldo,
1997; Roth et al., 1996; Tarboton et al., 1991). In the context of
the present work, the drainage network is pruned through the pro-
cedure proposed by Giannoni et al. (2005), which takes into ac-
count contributing area, A, and local slope, S, in the form ASk. On
the basis of this area-slope criterion, a channel is expected to start
from locations where the quantity ASk exceeds a threshold value.
Once a channel is generated, its path to the outlet is identified by
following the maximum slope direction.
This procedure produces a non-uniform drainage density, an
important attribute when accurate recognition of the extension
of the drainage system is essential. In this framework, the k expo-
nent of the threshold expression is substantially responsible for
drainage density redistribution within the basin. In fact, this
parameter, by assigning different importance to the slope, aug-
ments the influence of high slope values in steep mountain zones,
and does the opposite in flat areas. The k = 1.7 value is assumed in
the present work (for a complete discussion on this topic see Gian-
noni et al., 2005). The threshold above which a drainage is pro-
duced is here fixed to achieve, for the Tanaro catchment, the
average drainage density value obtained by the Po Basin Authority,
that is ASk P 5104 m2 and Dd = 0.74 m1. The resulting drainage
network is depicted in Fig. 3, from which one could both remark
the significant increase in the extension of the network, and guess
(e.g., from DEM shadows) the presence of small tributaries still not
considered as potential hazard sources. Obviously, landscape dis-
section by surface transport processes starts well below the dimen-
sion here determined by the threshold value assumption (see, e.g.,
Montgomery and Dietrich, 1988). Nevertheless, the small size of
un-dissected catchments, as well as their location in hilly and
mountain areas, allows assuming that all main hazard sources
are taken into account, at least for the aims of the present work.
Moreover, a possible downsizing to the scales of surface dissection
and channel generation processes will result in an all-pervading
hazard source.
4. Marginal hazard identification
For the purpose of the present paper, a marginal hazard level is
assigned to the areas that are subject to the flood hazard with a re-
turn time greater than that used to identify flood-prone areas. The
hazard in such areas is less than low, and tends to zero. As a con-
sequence, the flooding hazard for a given location can be set to
marginal if (i) all the potential flood risk sources have been taken
into account and (ii) for each single risk source the location is out-
side its flood-prone area.
305
Fig. 4. Marginal hazard areas of the Tanaro basin (green) identified according to the
Po Basin Authority hazard studies. Marginal hazard areas are recognized as those
cells (i) directly drained by the network of Fig. 2a, (ii) not prone to floods according
to Fig. 2c, and (iii) not flowing through the streams depicted in light-blue in Fig. 3.
(For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is
referred to the web version of this article.)
The calibration of classifiers able to discriminate the hazard le-
vel needs a training set that includes elements that belong to all
the classes: high, medium, low, and marginal. For this purpose,
marginal hazard areas associated to the network of Fig. 2 should
be identified.
Marginal hazard areas are here recognized as the ensemble of
the DEM cells that are: (i) directly drained by the studied network
of Fig. 2a; (ii) not recognized as prone to floods according to
Fig. 2b; and (iii) not flowing through the streams depicted in
light-blue in Fig. 3. Note that the last condition holds only for those
locations not subject to be flooded from a non-studied stream.
In Fig. 4 the results of this identification procedure are pre-
sented, it now includes four hazard classes (high, medium, low,
and marginal) although unclassified areas are still present.
5. Flood-related basic morphologic features
Binary classifiers need a dataset of features on which calibration
and predictions are to be performed. Basin surface topography and
morphology are here represented by a DEM: obvious ingredient of
the dataset is therefore the location of the cell under exam (lati-
tude and longitude). The hazard class (high, medium, low, or mar-
ginal) will be provided for calibration purposes where available.
Other features should be related to the physical process under
investigation, and available for the entire area under study, in this
case the Tanaro catchment. In this work, simple morphologic fea-
tures are taken into account, leaving their matching and weighting
to the classifier structure. The selected features, specified for each
DEM cell, are: distance from the nearest stream, D, elevation to the
nearest stream, H, surface curvature, DH (defined as the Laplacian
of the elevation), contributing area, A, and local slope, S, estimated
as the maximum slope among the eight possible flow directions
that connect the cell under exam to the adjacent cells. Contributing
area and local slope are the main ingredients of the Topographic
Index (TI) first introduced by Kirkby (1975) and recently modified
to detect flood-prone areas from DEMs by Manfreda et al. (2011).
In the present work, these two features will be considered sepa-
rately, together, and mixed with all other features.
Two features are related to the cell location with respect to the
nearest stream. The distance from the nearest stream is the length
of the path, identified by following the maximum slope direction,
which connects the cell under exam to the nearest element of
the reference drainage network (Fig. 3). The elevation to the near-
est stream is the difference between the elevation of the cell under
exam and the elevation of the final point of the above-identified
path. As suggested by intuition, large distance and elevation values
306 M. Degiorgis et al. / Journal of Hydrology 470–471 (2012) 302–315
correspond to a lower flood hazard. Finally, the surface curvature is
related to the ability to discriminate convex divides from concave
valley bottoms, more prone to be flooded.
6. Dataset and performance measures
As a result from the above, the available dataset is composed of
187,306 labeled data points pertaining to both the Tanaro basin
flood-prone areas recognized by the Po Basin Authority, and to
conterminous areas subject to a marginal flood hazard. Each data
point contains latitude and longitude plus the following five fea-
tures: D, H, DH, A, S. Within flood-prone areas, the dataset provides
also the hazard level: high, medium or low. For sake of simplicity,
we first ignore the hazard level, and divide data points into two
classes: class 0 for marginal hazard data points, and class 1 for data
points with high, medium or low hazard level. The data points
belonging to class 0 are 131,785 (about 70% of the size of the data-
set); the ones from class 1 are 55,521 (about 30% of the size of the
dataset).
Since the dataset was necessarily sampled from a portion of the
geographical region under investigation, we did not use latitude
and longitude to train the classifiers. While these two features
may be useful to classify data points that are in the neighborhood
of some training sample, they may be misleading for the classifica-
tion of data points coming from sub-regions where no training
sample is available.
To investigate the dependence of simulation results on the size
of the dataset, some simulations were performed on both the
whole dataset and suitably chosen subsets. Indeed, the first option
may be time-consuming for large datasets. To reduce simulation
time, only a few training samples may be sufficient to evaluate
empirical estimates of the same metrics computed using the whole
dataset.
In some applications, because of the different importance as-
signed to the occurrence of each of the two events, achieving a
small average misclassification error on one of the two classes
may be more significant than obtaining a small average misclassi-
fication error on the other class. During the training phase, assign-
ing two different weights to the average misclassification errors on
the two classes may satisfy this need. However, sometimes the ex-
act values of such weights are difficult to establish. A second way
to satisfy this need is through the so-called Receiver Operating
Characteristics (ROC) curve (see, e.g., Fawcett, 2006), which is de-
fined in terms of false positive and true positive rates. We recall
that, for any given binary classifier, the false positive rate, rfp, is
the probability that a sample coming from class 0 is erroneously
classified as a sample coming from class 1, i.e. a marginal hazard
area is classified as flood prone. Similarly, the false negative rate,
rfn, is the probability that a sample coming from class 1 is errone-
ously classified as a sample coming from class 0. The true positive
rate, rtp, and the true negative rate, rtn, are simply obtained as
Fig. 5. Pictorial representation of linear classifiers (a) and SVM classifiers (b). For graphical reasons, the case of two features x1 and x2 is considered. Note that in (a) a single-
feature linear classifier corresponds to a horizontal or vertical separating line. In (b), again for graphical reasons, the case H ¼ R2 is illustrated.
rtp = (1  rfn) and rtn = (1  rfp). The ROC curve is defined as the
set of pairs (rfp, rtp) obtained by varying the threshold of a binary
classifier. The Area Under the ROC Curve (also known as AUC) is
a common measure of performance, used to compare different
kinds of binary classifiers. This measure does not require one to as-
sign different weights to the average misclassification errors on the
two classes, or to specify their a priori probabilities. In general, the
area under the ROC curve is between 0 and 1. The larger the AUC,
the better the classifier. AUC values greater than 0.5 correspond to
classifiers performing better than chance. Indeed, a completely
random classifier (one that is no better at recognizing true posi-
tives than flipping a coin) has an area under the ROC curve of
0.5. Instead, a classifier with 0 false positives and 0 false negatives
has AUC = 1. In the following, rfp, rtp, and AUC are used as perfor-
mance measures of the binary classifiers.
7. Linear binary classifiers
A pictorial representation of linear binary classifiers is provided
in Fig. 5a. They are introduced in this section, while SVM with lin-
ear and Gaussian kernels (Fig. 5b) are presented in Section 8. In the
first case, classifiers use only one (Section 7.1) or two (Section 7.2)
of the selected features presented in Section 5 whereas, in the sec-
ond case, all five features are jointly used. To compare different
classifiers, we use performance measures introduced in Section 6.
The respective ROC curves are first obtained by varying the classi-
fication threshold. Then, corresponding AUCs are evaluated, and
the binary classifier with the largest AUC value is finally selected.
7.1. Classifiers based on a single feature and ROC curves
We first considered linear binary classifiers based on a single
feature, chosen among the following: D, H, DH, A, and S. Data were
then normalized in such a way that each normalized feature – ob-
tained after translation and scaling of the original feature – lies be-
tween 1 and 1. Consequently, also the threshold in the classifiers
was normalized.
Single feature classifiers have the advantage of being particu-
larly simple and quick to be trained, since only the threshold has
to be set. Fig. 6 shows the ROC curves associated with the five lin-
ear binary classifiers obtained by separately thresholding each of
the five features, and varying the threshold. Table 1 shows the cor-
responding AUCs. For the classifiers based on H, D, and S, each data
point was assigned to the class 0 if the feature was above the
threshold, and to the class 1 if it was under the threshold. Instead,
for the classifiers based on the features DH and A, each data point
was assigned to the class 0 if the corresponding feature was under
the threshold, and to the class 1 if it was above the threshold. The
reason for such different choices is that these two different rules
allow one to obtain ROC curves whose AUCs are greater than 0.5
for all the five classifiers.
 M. Degiorgis et al. / Journal of Hydrology 470–471 (2012) 302–315
Fig. 6. Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) curve for the five selected features.
ROC curves are obtained by applying a threshold to one of the five features in the
dataset, and by varying the threshold.
Table 1
AUCs for the five linear binary classifiers obtained by thresholding one of the features
in the dataset, and varying the threshold. Note that a perfect classifier has AUC = 1
and a random binary classifier has AUC = 0.5.
H DH S A D any of the previous linear binary classifiers, which are based on
AUC 0.9399 0.5459 0.7028 0.5081 0.8628
One could note that for the classifier based on relative elevation
(i.e., H) a quite good performance in terms of the AUC was ob-
tained. Fig. 7 shows the false positive rate and the true positive rate
as functions of the normalized threshold, for the linear binary clas-
sifier associated with this feature.
The best value of the normalized threshold is obtained by min-
imizing the sum of the false positive rate and the false negative
rate rfp + (1  rtp) (note that equal weights have been assigned to
the two rates). Since the associated ROC curve can be well approx-
imated by a concave and continuously differentiable function, this
is obtained by finding a value k 2 R such that the line rtp = rfp + k is
tangent to the ROC curve. The value of the optimal normalized
threshold so obtained is H = 0.8460, for which one has rfp =
0.1599 (i.e., rtn = 0.8401), rtp = 0.9146, and rfp + (1  rtp) = 0.2453.
7.2. Classifiers based on two features and ROC curves
We now consider the case of linear binary classifier based on
two features, investigating the distributions of the projections of
the data on the subspaces associated with various pairs of features.
Even though the distributions of two classes could partially over-
lap, better classification performance may be in general obtained
by considering linear binary classifiers acting on two features in-
stead than one feature, or more generally nonlinear binary classifi-
ers such as those introduced in Section 8. We proceed as follows.
Let (x1, x2) be any of the 10 possible pairs of normalized features
selected among the available five normalized features (D, H, DH, A
and S). Then, we search for a linear binary classifier based on such
two normalized features x1 and x2, whose performance (in terms of
307
Fig. 7. Performance of the single-feature-classifier based on relative elevation.
Performance curves are obtained by varying the threshold.
the sum of the error rates and the AUC) is better than the one of
one single feature.
More specifically, for each choice of x1 and x2, we consider can-
didate classifiers of the form
Sða1 x1 þ a2 x2  a3 Þ ð1Þ
where S() is the Heaviside step function (see Appendix A for its def-
inition), x1 and x2 are the selected normalized features, a1 and a2
the associated coefficients in the linear combination, and a3 the
threshold. Among these classifiers, we search for one classifier that
minimizes rfp + (1  rtp). We call rfp and rtp the so-obtained optimal
values. We repeat the procedure for each of the 10 possible pairs of
normalized features. In the particular case in which one between x1
and x2 is the normalized feature H, the condition rfp + (1  r°tp) -
6 0.2453 holds a priori, since any linear binary classifier based on
H alone is a particular case a linear binary classifier based on two
features, one of which is H (hopefully, one may obtain rfp +
(1  rtp) < 0.2453).
The classifier described by (1) can be considered as a combina-
tion of two single-feature classifiers, with suitable weights on the
features and a suitable threshold. Note that, for any c > 0, one has
S(a1x1 + a2x2  a3) = S(ca1x1 + ca2x2  ca3). This, combined with
the normalization of x1 and x2, allows one to restrict the search
for the optimal parameters to a1 = cos(h), a2 = sin(h), a3 -
= t(cos(h) + sin(h)), where h e [0, 2p) and t e [1, 1].
Approximately optimal parameters can be searched for by dis-
cretizing h and t. In the simulations, 360 values for h were consid-
ered, and 1000 for t. All the simulations were performed using
Matlab 7.7 on a personal computer with a 2.40 GHz Core2 Quad
Q6600 CPU and 2 GB of RAM.
Table 2 shows the obtained results, for the particular cases in
which the two rates rfp and rtp are replaced by their empirical esti-
mates, obtained by sampling i.i.d. the given data distribution, 5000
308 M. Degiorgis et al. / Journal of Hydrology 470–471 (2012) 302–315

Table 2
Empirical false positive rate, r fp , and true positive rate, r tp , and the sum r fp þ ð1  r tp Þ for the (approximately) optimal two features linear binary classifiers. The samples were
obtained by sampling i.i.d. from the given data distribution (for n = 5000 and n = 20,000).

Pairs of features r fp n ¼ 5000 r tp n ¼ 5000 r fp þ ð1  r tp Þn ¼ 5000 rtp n ¼ 20; 000 r tp n ¼ 20; 000 r fp þ ð1  r  tpÞn ¼ 20; 000

H, DH 0.1658 0.9209 0.2449 0.1563 0.9166 0.2397

H, S 0.1899 0.9566 0.2333 0.1803 0.9546 0.2256
H, A 0.1689 0.9230 0.2459 0.1656 0.9257 0.2399
H, D 0.1277 0.9062 0.2215 0.1523 0.9483 0.2040
DH, S 0.5053 0.8775 0.6278 0.5406 0.9173 0.6233
DH, A 0.7585 0.9454 0.8131 0.7569 0.9369 0.8200
DH, D 0.2258 0.7691 0.4567 0.2481 0.8034 0.4447
S, A 0.5980 0.9454 0.6526 0.5473 0.9064 0.6409
S, D 0.1854 0.8258 0.3957 0.2016 0.8656 0.3360
A, D 0.2249 0.7691 0.4559 0.2572 0.8095 0.4476

Table 3 Table 4
False positive rate, r fp , true positive rate, r tp , the sum r fp þ ð1  r tp Þ, and the h and t AUCs for the (approximately) optimal two features linear binary classifier for the
parameters for the (approximately) optimal two features linear binary classifiers. choices x1 = H and x2 = D, and for the linear binary classifiers obtained by thresholding
one of the same two features.
Pairs of features r fp r tp r fp þ ð1  r tp Þ h t
H and D H D
H, DH 0.1636 0.9212 0.2424 183° 0.794
AUC 0.9575 0.9399 0.8628
H, S 0.1629 0.9340 0.2289 171° 0.824
H, A 0.1732 0.9289 0.2443 182° 0.846
H, D 0.1369 0.9283 0.2086 186° 0.838
DH, S 0.5466 0.9200 0.6266 248° 0.586 whole dataset, respectively. Moreover, Tables 2 and 3 show that
DH, A 0.7795 0.9528 0.8267 16° 0.182 even with 5000 i.i.d. samples one is able to obtain the optimal
DH, D 0.2270 0.7789 0.4481 275° 0.954 selection of x1 and x2 (i.e., x1 = H and x2 = D).
S, A 0.5920 0.9444 0.6477 183° 0.870 Let Uða1 x1 þ a2 x2  a3 Þ be an (approximately) optimal linear
S, D 0.1938 0.8521 0.3417 219° 0.874
binary classifier and consider the choices x1 = H and x2 = D. The
A, D 0.2403 0.7899 0.4504 284° 0.790
classifier associates the pattern (x1, x2) to the class 0 if
a1 x1 þ a2 x2 6 a3 , to the class 1 otherwise. Then, the ROC curve
and 20,000 times, respectively (in both cases, the same samples associated with such a classifier is obtained by varying only its
were used to evaluate rfp and rtp, for each of the 10 kinds of classi- threshold a3 (while fixing a1 ¼ a1 and a2 ¼ a2 ), and plotting the
fiers). Instead, Table 3 shows the results obtained by computing resulting pairs (rfp, rtp). Hopefully, the resulting AUC may be greater
the true rfp and rtp (i.e., the ones obtained using the whole dataset), than 0.9399. This is indeed the case, since in the simulation the ob-
and also the corresponding approximately optimal parameters h tained AUC was 0.9575. Fig. 8 compares the ROC curve associated
and t. with such a binary classifier and the ones associated with the linear
The results of Tables 2 and 3 are quite similar, in accordance to binary classifiers obtained by thresholding one of the two features.
Appendix A about Statistical Learning Theory. Note, however, that Then, Table 4 shows the corresponding AUCs.
the samples used in Table 2 are less than 2.7% and 10.7% of the

8. Binary SVMs with linear and Gaussian kernel and ROC curves

Next, to evaluate linear binary classifiers based on more than

Fig. 8. Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) curve and AUC for the best two-
features classifier, i.e. the one based on relative elevation and distance from the
nearest stream. ROC curves and AUCs for the two single-feature-classifiers based on
the same two features are also reported.
two features, we trained a binary SVM classifier with linear kernel
and L1-soft margin (see Appendix B for a short introduction to
SVMs and Fig. 5b for a pictorial representation), using all the five
features and giving the same weights to samples coming from
either of the two classes. In the simulations, we used the Sequen-
tial Minimal Optimization (SMO) algorithm (Platt, 1998) (as imple-
mented in the Matlab Statistical Pattern Recognition Toolbox
(Franc and Hlávač, 2004)) to solve the associated optimization
problem, choosing C = 5 for the regularization parameter. Note
that, since the SVM is using a linear kernel, the risk of over-fitting
with even a few samples is low, as the VC-dimension of the class of
indicator functions that the algorithm can produce as outputs is at
most 6. However, in order to reduce further such a risk (and also
the simulation time), the training set was obtained selecting ran-
domly about 25% of the dataset, and the performance metrics rfp
and rtp were evaluated first on a validation set made up of about
the remaining 75% of the dataset, and then on the whole dataset.
Table 5 shows the weight vector w and the bias b of the so-ob-
tained binary SVM classifier, and the AUCs associated with the ROC
curves obtained by varying its bias while fixing the weight vector
to w, and whose rates rfp and rtp are computed on the validation
set and on the whole dataset, respectively (as expected, the two
ROC curves resulted actually almost overlapping, see Fig. 9). Note
that the corresponding values of the AUCs (0.9593 and 0.9595,
 M. Degiorgis et al. / Journal of Hydrology 470–471 (2012) 302–315
Table 5
Weight vector, w, bias, b, and AUC for the binary SVM classifier with linear kernel obtained after training. The ROC curve associated with the binary SVM classifier was obtained
by varying the bias while fixing the weight vector. Two different AUCs are shown, associated to ROC curves whose rates rfp and rtp are evaluated on the validation set and on the
whole dataset.
wH wDH wS wA
28.7222 2.5115 1.6437 0.0485
Fig. 9. ROC curve and AUC for the SVM classifier with linear kernel. The ROC curve
and the AUC for the best two-feature classifier are also reported.
respectively) are greater than any of the AUCs obtained in the pre-
vious simulations, and that the largest components (in absolute va-
lue) of the weight vector w are the ones associated with the
normalized features H and D (i.e., the ones for which the best per-
formances were obtained for the case of the linear binary classifiers
based on two features).
Fig. 9 shows the ROC curve of the obtained binary SVM classifier
and the one of the optimal linear binary classifier shown in Table 3,
for the choice x1 = H and x2 = D. We also report that the trained bin-
ary SVM classifier with linear kernel has rfp = 0.0931 and
rtp = 0.8696, and that the minimum value of rfp + (1  rtp) on the
associated ROC curve is obtained on the point (rfp = 0.1359,
rtp = 0.9277), for which one has rfp + (1  rtp) = 0.2082.
Finally, we considered the case of a Gaussian kernel (the actual
n 2
o provides a measure of the usefulness of such feature for the classi-
kernel used in the simulation was Kðx; yÞ ¼ exp kxyk 2r2
, were x, y
are 5-dimensional vectors of normalized features). Due to the nor-
malization of each component of the data vector, one has
pffiffiffi
0 6 kx  yk 6 2 5 for all x, y in the dataset, so in the simulation
we made the choice r = 0.4 in order to avoid over-fitting and, at
the same time, to make sure that, for each x in the dataset, the va-
lue assumed by the kernel K(x, y) is nearly 0 for points y in the
dataset that are far from x. The only other change with respect to
the simulation performed in the case of the binary SVM classifier
with linear kernel was a significant reduction in the sizes of both
the training set and the validation set (their cardinalities were cho-
sen about 30% of the ones of the corresponding sets chosen for the
simulation performed in the case of the linear kernel). This was
made in order to reduce further the simulation time.
The corresponding AUCs were 0.9568 and 0.9563, respectively
(these results are also reported in Table 6, together with the num-
309
wD b AUC validation set AUC dataset
4.8648 26.7012 0.9593 0.9595
Table 6
Number of support vectors and AUC for the binary SVM classifier with Gaussian
kernel obtained after training. The ROC curve associated with the binary SVM
classifier was obtained by varying the bias while fixing the weight vector. Two
different kinds of AUCs are shown, associated to ROC curves whose rates rfp and rtp are
evaluated on the validation set and on the whole dataset.
# Support vectors AUC validation set AUC dataset
3139 0.9568 0.9563
ber of support vectors out of 12500 training samples). The ROC
curve whose rates rfp and rtp are evaluated on the whole dataset
is practically coincident with the one obtained in the case of the
linear kernel, so it is not reported. However, there was no improve-
ment in the AUC with respect to the results shown in Table 5 for
the linear kernel (actually, a slight worsening was obtained, since
the corresponding values in Table 5 are 0.9593 and 0.9595). Among
the possible reasons of this behavior, we recall that, up to our
knowledge, the standard SVM optimization problem with L1-soft
margin is not directly related to the optimization of the AUC, even
though some relationships between SVM optimization and AUC
optimization (in a suitable feature space) hold when a L2-soft mar-
gin penalty is chosen (Rakotomamonjy, 2004).
Finally, we report that for the trained binary SVM classifier with
Gaussian kernel one has rfp = 0.0763 and rtp = 0.8346, and that the
minimum value of rfp + (1  rtp) on the associated ROC curve is ob-
tained on the point (rfp = 0.1299, rtp = 0.9219), for which one has
rfp + (1  rtp) = 0.2080. This is the best result obtained in all the
simulations concerning the minimization of rfp + (1  rtp). How-
ever, the improvement with respect to other classifiers is not very
large (0.2080 vs. 0.2082 derived from Table 3), this is likely due to a
slight overlapping between the two classes, which may not be re-
moved without incurring in over-fitting (nor without adding more
features to the ones available). Finally, we observe that the simula-
tions performed for the classifiers based on two features described
in Section 7 provided only slightly worse results with respect to the
best ones, but with significantly smaller simulation times. More-
over, such simulation results are more easily to be interpreted than
those obtained for the case of the SVM with Gaussian kernel, since
the weight assigned to a normalized feature in a linear classifier
fication problem at hand, while such an information is not pro-
vided by the support vectors in the case of the SVM with
Gaussian kernel.
9. Hazard graduation
We now take into account hazard graduation in three classes:
high, medium, and low. Among the 55,521 data points (of class
1) that are labeled as flood prone, 16,659 of them (about 30%)
are further labeled as areas subject to a low flood hazard (subclass
1), whereas other 20,099 (about 36%) are subject to a medium
flood hazard (subclass 2) and the remaining 18,763 ones (about
34%) are subject to a high flood hazard (subclass 3). To separate
the various subclasses with suitable binary classifiers, we propose
the following procedure. We first defined a new class 00
(low + marginal) made up of all the data points from class 0 and
310 M. Degiorgis et al. / Journal of Hydrology 470–471 (2012) 302–315

Table 7
Binary classification problems with classes [(marginal) vs. (high + medium + low)], [(low + marginal) vs. (high + medium)], and [(medium + low + marginal) vs. (high)],
respectively: false positive rate, rfp , true positive rate, r tp , the sum r fp þ ð1  r tp ), the h and t parameters, and the AUC for the (approximately) optimal linear binary classifiers for
the choices x1 = H and x2 = D.

Hazard classes r fp r tp r fp þ ð1  r tp Þ h t AUC

(Marginal) vs. (high + medium + low) 0.1369 0.9283 0.2086 186° 0.838 0.9575
(Low + marginal) vs. (high + medium) 0.1590 0.9270 0.2319 190° 0.850 0.9446
(Medium + low + marginal) vs. (high) 0.1967 0.9254 0.2713 190° 0.862 0.9250

the ones from subclass 1, and a new class 10 (high + medium) made
up of all the data points from subclasses 2 and 3. Similarly, we de-
fined a new class 000 (medium + low + marginal) made up of all the
data points from class 0 and the ones from subclasses 1 and 2, and
a new class 100 (high) made up of all the data points from subclass 3.
In this way, it was possible to apply the same binary classification
techniques used in the previous simulations to first separate clas-
ses 00 and 10 , then classes 000 and 100 .
In particular, we considered only linear binary classifiers based
on the two normalized features H and D, since this was the best
architecture (in terms of both the performance and the simulation
time) found in the previous simulations to separate classes 0 and 1.
The obtained results are shown in Table 7, whereas Fig. 10 shows
the obtained ROC curves.

Fig. 10. Hazard graduation. ROC curve for the binary [(low + marginal) vs.
(high + medium)] (a), and the [(medium + low + marginal) vs. (high)] (b) hazard
classifiers. The two-feature classifier of Fig. 8 is also reported for comparison
purposes. All classifiers are based on relative elevation and distance from the
nearest stream. AUC values are also reported.

Table 8
Performances of the three multiclass classifiers in terms of their identification of the
hazard level. The results are in%. Best performances are highlighted in bold.

Hazard level Multiclass Multiclass Multiclass

classifier 1 classifier 2 classifier 3
Correctly identified 72.3 74.8 75.2
Overestimated by 1 level 13.2 11.9 11.5
Overestimated by 2 levels 7.3 5.5 5.4 Fig. 11. Tanaro basin. Flood-prone areas (a) and hazard graduation (b) identified
Overestimated by 3 levels 4.0 1.9 1.2 according to the two-features classifiers based on relative elevation and distance
Underestimated by 1 level 2.2 4.2 5.0 from the nearest stream. Compare respectively with Fig. 2b and c. Red, yellow and
Underestimated by 2 levels 0.8 1.3 1.3 blue respectively indicate high, medium and low hazard areas. (For interpretation
Underestimated by 3 levels 0.2 0.3 0.3 of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web
version of this article.)

Table 9
Performances of the three multiclass classifiers in terms in of the extensions of the four kinds of sub-regions identified by the classifiers (high, medium, low, and marginal hazard).
The results are also shown in% with respect to the total extension of the region investigated (around the river Tanaro). The best performances of each row (with respect to the data
available from the Po Basin Authority, B.A.) are highlighted in bold.

Hazard B.A. (river Multiclass Multiclass classifier 1 vs. Multiclass Multiclass classifier 2 vs. Multiclass Multiclass classifier 3 vs.
level Tanaro) classifier 1 B.A. (%) classifier 2 B.A. (%) classifier 3 B.A. (%)
Marginal 70 63 10.7 66 6.3 66 6.3
Low 9 5 40.3 7 20.5 7 20.5
Medium 11 5 54.7 7 37.1 10 5.6
High 10 27 +169.3 20 +101.8 17 +68.2
 M. Degiorgis et al. / Journal of Hydrology 470–471 (2012) 302–315 311

The final multiclass classifier merges the outputs of the three
‘‘inner’’ binary classifiers associated with the three pairs of classes
in the following way:
(1) A data point is considered at marginal hazard level if it is
associated by the three binary classifiers to the classes 0, 00
and 000 , respectively.
(2) It is considered at low hazard level if it is associated to the
classes 1, 00 and 000 , respectively.
(3) It is considered at medium hazard level if it is associated to
the classes 1, 10 and 000 , respectively.
(4) It is considered at high hazard level if it is associated to the
classes 1, 10 and 100 , respectively.
Note that such a multiclass classifier is in general nonlinear, de-
spite the fact that the inner binary classifiers are linear.
At this point, we observe that the three inner binary classifiers
on which the multiclass classifier is based are obtained by giving
equal weights to the error rates associated with the classes 0 and
1, 00 and 10 , and 000 and 100 , respectively. Indeed, each of them is
obtained by minimizing rfp + (1  rtp). A different criterion con-
sists in using different weights to the error rates associated with
the two classes of each of the three inner binary classifiers. For
instance, giving more weight to one of the two classes may pro-
vide better performance of the binary classifier with respect to
that class, without a significant decrease in performance with re-
spect to the other class. Then, we defined three multiclass classi-
fiers (each of which is based on three binary classifiers with
classes 0 and 1, 00 and 10 , and 000 and 100 , respectively) in the fol-
lowing way:

(1) For Multiclass Classifier 1, all the three binary classifiers are
Fig. 12. Tanaro basin. Composite of Po Basin Authority predictions [Fig. 2b] and obtained by minimizing rfp + (1  rtp), as described above.
hazard graduation identified according to the two-features classifiers based on
(2) For Multiclass Classifier 2, the binary classifier with classes 0
relative elevation and distance from the nearest stream [Fig. 11b]. When available,
Basin Authority predictions are preferred due to their higher reliability. Red, yellow, and 1 is obtained by minimizing 1.5rfp + (1  rtp), the one
blue and green respectively indicate high, medium, low and marginal hazard areas. with classes 00 and 10 by minimizing 2rfp + (1  rtp), and the
(For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is one with classes 000 and 100 by minimizing 2.5rfp + (1  rtp).
referred to the web version of this article.)

Fig. 13. Flood hazard predictions for a portion of the Tevere (Central Italy) basin: Basin Authority data (a), marginal hazard areas (b), two-features classifiers based on relative
elevation and distance from the nearest stream (c), and composite picture (d). Red, yellow and blue respectively indicate high, medium, low hazard areas. Dark and light green
indicate marginal hazard areas as identified from Basin Authority data or by the binary classifier, respectively. (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure
legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)
312 M. Degiorgis et al. / Journal of Hydrology 470–471 (2012) 302–315

(3) For Multiclass Classifier 3, the binary classifier with classes 0
and 1 is obtained by minimizing 1.5rfp + (1  rtp), the one
with classes 00 and 10 by minimizing 2rfp + (1  rtp), and the
one with classes 000 and 100 by minimizing 3rfp + (1  rtp).
One can observe that the different coefficients assigned to the
error rates allow one to take into account the different numbers
of training samples for the two classes of each of the inner binary
classifiers, and to give more weight to the ‘‘more important’’ clas-
ses (e.g., one may want to give more weight to the error made
when associating a marginal hazard level to an area with high,
medium or low hazard level, with respect to the weight assigned
to the error made in associating a high, medium, or low hazard le-
vel to an area with marginal hazard level. Finally, by varying the
same coefficients, one can control the extensions of the sub-re-
gions classified as at a high, medium, low, or marginal hazard level.
Tables 8 and 9 show the results obtained for the three multi-
class classifiers described above. As shown by the tables, the best
overall performances were obtained for Multiclass Classifier 3.
10. Application and results
The application of the above described procedure to the streams
studied by the Po Basin Authority for the Tanaro catchment is pre-
sented in Fig. 11 with reference to the two-feature linear classifier
based on relative elevation and distance from the nearest stream.
Consequently, results are limited to the streams of Fig. 2a for which
the flood prone status and the hazard graduation are already avail-
able, and depicted in Fig. 2b and c.
One could notice that the overall extension and location of
flood-prone areas (Fig. 2b vs. Fig. 11a) is well replicated by the clas-
sifier. As a result of the adopted calibration procedure, an overesti-
mation error is envisaged. This is confirmed by Fig. 11a which
shows a small overestimation of flood-prone areas, confirmed by
the rfp ¼ 0:1369 value which characterizes this classifier (see
Table 3).
Fig. 11b shows classifiers results for hazard graduation. When
compared with Fig. 2c, hazard overestimation is detected. Again,
overestimation is definitely to be preferred over underestimation,
and may be partially anticipated by the selected calibration proce-
dure. Values of r fp increase up to r fp ¼ 0:1967. This latter value is
associated to the identification of high hazard areas. This may be
partially due to the DEM grid size, which does not allow for the rec-
ognition of flood defense structures such as levees, dams and weirs.
In fact, overestimation is easily detected in flat valley areas, were
levees are more effective, and tend to vanish moving upstream to-
ward hilly and mountainous areas.
Classifiers should be applied to predict flood-prone areas and
hazard graduation in non-studied areas. Fig. 12 shows, for the en-
tire Tanaro basin, a composite of the Po Basin Authority predictions
and the results of the two-feature linear classifier based on relative
elevation and distance from the nearest stream. Basin Authority
predictions, resulting from intensive field surveys and from valu-
able hydrologic and hydraulic studies, are characterized by a high-
er reliability. Consequently, in Fig. 12 they are overlapped to
classifier results. Since the classifier now identify flood-prone areas
for the entire catchment, also areas subject to a marginal hazard
could be depicted.

Fig. 14. Flood hazard predictions for a portion of the Dora Baltea (Valle d’Aosta Region, Northwestern Italy) basin: Basin Authority data (a), marginal hazard areas (b), two-
features classifiers based on relative elevation and distance from the nearest stream (c), and composite picture (d). Red, yellow and blue respectively indicate high, medium,
low hazard areas. Dark and light green indicate marginal hazard areas as identified from Basin Authority data or by the binary classifier, respectively. (For interpretation of the
references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)
 M. Degiorgis et al. / Journal of Hydrology 470–471 (2012) 302–315 313

The linear binary classifier calibrated on the Tanaro basin data
provided by the Po Basin Authority and complemented by mar-
ginal hazard identification procedure described in Section 4, can
be applied also outside the Tanaro catchment. While quantitative
measures of classifiers performances are meaningless outside the
calibration catchment, qualitative comparisons will shed some
light on the possible extensive classifiers application on wide areas,
at least to obtain a preliminary description of the flooding hazard.
The two-feature linear classifier based on relative elevation and
distance from the nearest stream, calibrated with the Tanaro data
set, has been therefore applied to three different cases: the Tevere
basin in Central Italy, the Dora Baltea basin in Northwestern Italy,
and the Quirra basin in the Sardinia island, Italy. Results are pre-
sented in Figs. 13–15, respectively.
The three cases were selected for their specific characteristics.
The Tevere River represents the case of a well-studied catchment:
flood-prone areas and hazard graduation is available for almost the
entire mainstream and for a number of tributaries. Dora Baltea Riv-
er is studied intermittently, along the mainstream only. The Quirra
River is studied for its final reach only.
Results depicted in Figs. 13–15 show that the classifier is able to
provide a good description of flood-prone areas and hazard gradu-
ation. In all cases, simulation results mimic well the Basin Author-
ities predictions, and composite pictures do not show abrupt
changes at the interface between the two data sources. As com-
mented with reference to the Tanaro basin results, a small overes-
timation is produced with respect to the prediction of flood-prone
areas extension and for high hazard areas identification.
11. Conclusions
A simple linear binary classifier, based on two features related
to the location of the site under exam with respect to the nearest
hazard source, allows distinguishing flood-prone areas. The two
best-performing features, selected among the five available, seem
to confirm the intuition that an increasing distance from the risk
sources corresponds to a lower hazard. The first feature is the
length of the path that hydrologically connects the location under
exam to the nearest element of the drainage network. The second
feature is the difference in elevation between the cell under exam
and the final point of the same path. The identification is per-
formed with a high reliability: for the Tanaro case study, 93% of
flood-prone areas are properly recognized by the classifier, and
only 14% of the areas subject to a marginal hazard are improperly
assigned.
The same structure can be applied for hazard graduation. While
a negligible reduction in the performances of the resulting multi-
class classifier is observed in terms of its ability to correctly recog-
nize high hazard areas, an increase of false positive up to 19% is
detected. This is partially originated from the selected optimization
procedure, whose main goal is the correct identification of flood-
prone areas, and partially due to the DEM resolution. This, in fact,
seems high enough to describe the local terrain morphology, but
far from allowing the recognition of flood control structures.
Results derived from the application to different catchments
seem to qualitatively indicate the ability of the classifier to perform
well also outside the calibration region.

Fig. 15. Flood hazard predictions for a portion of the Quirra (Sardinia, Italy) basin: Basin Authority data (a), marginal hazard areas (b), two-features classifiers based on
relative elevation and distance from the nearest stream (c), and composite picture (d). Red, yellow and blue respectively indicate high, medium, low hazard areas. Dark and
light green indicate marginal hazard areas as identified from Basin Authority data or by the binary classifier, respectively. (For interpretation of the references to color in this
figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)
314 M. Degiorgis et al. / Journal of Hydrology 470–471 (2012) 302–315

Pattern classification techniques should be taken into account
when the completeness in the identification of flood-prone areas
and hazard grading is required for large regions or when a first
identification is desired. This may be the case (i) for specific appli-
cations, such as those related to the insurance market; (ii) for spe-
cific areas, for which the available information is limited; or (iii)
whenever a cost to benefit ratio should address further detailed
of a binary classifier), a fixed nonlinear map u: RR ! E, where E
is an (usually infinite-dimensional) Euclidean space, a fixed regu-
larization parameter C > 0, and a fixed parameter p e {1, 2}, a binary
SVM classifier with Lp-soft margin is obtained by solving the fol-
lowing optimization problem (see, e.g., Franc and Hlávač, 2004):
!
 1 Xn

flood-mapping activities. ðw ; b Þ ¼ arg min kwk2E þ C npi

w2E;b2R 2 i¼1

Appendix A. Some results from Statistical Learning Theory 8

< hw; xi iE þ b 6 1 þ ni ; yi ¼ 0;
>
We recall the following results from Statistical Learning Theory s:t: hw; xi iE þ b P þ1  ni ; yi ¼ 1;
>
:
(Vapnik, 1998). For a Borel-measurable set Z # Rd , a random vari- ni P 0; i ¼ 1; . . . ; n:
able z with values in Z and with associated distribution F, and a
set of binary-valued functions Q(, a): Z ? {0, 1} (functions of this The resulting binary SVM classifier is Sðhw; xiE þ bÞ where S() is
form are called indicator functions), parameterized by a e A, Theo- the Heaviside step function and x 2 Rd is the input to the classifier.
rem 4.4 from Section 4.9.2 in Vapnik (1998) provides the following It can be proved (see, e.g., Vapnik, 1998) that this classifier can be
uniform probabilistic bound on the absolute value of the difference also expressed as
R
between the expected risk Z Q ðz; aÞdFðzÞ and the empirical risk !
1
Pn X
n
i¼1 Q ðzi ; aÞ, (where the n samples zi are sampled i.i.d. from F):
 
n S a i ð2yi  1ÞKðx; xi Þ þ b ð4Þ
( Z  )
 1X n  i¼1
 
Prob sup Qðz; aÞdFðzÞ  Qðzi ; aÞ > e
a2A  Z n i¼1  where ai 2 R are suitable coefficients, and the function
  Kðx; yÞ :¼ huðxÞ; uðyÞiE is called kernel. For some spaces E, the kernel
hð1 þ lnð2n=hÞÞ
< 4 exp  e2 ; K has a simple expression. This is the case, e.g., of the linear kernel
n n 2
o
K(x, y) = hx, yi and the Gaussian kernel Kðx; yÞ ¼ exp  kxyk 2r2
,
where e⁄ = (e  1/n), and h is the VC-dimension of the set {Q(, a):
P where r > 0 is a fixed parameter. It often happens that only a small
a e A}. This result shows that the empirical risk a 1n ni¼1 Q ðzi ; aÞ is,
with high confidence, a good estimate of the expected risk subset of the coefficients ai (with respect to the total number n) is
R different from 0; the corresponding vectors u(xi) are called support
Z
Q ðz; aÞdFðzÞ (uniformly with respect to the choice of the parame-
ter a), when the number of i.i.d. samples n is large with respect to vectors.
the VC-dimension h. In practice, a binary SVM classifier can be interpreted as a bin-
In the particular case in which A ¼ Rm and Q(z, a) has the form ary linear classifier in the space H (see Fig. 5). It often allows one to
! separate data that are not linearly separable in the original space
X
m
(Fig. 5). At the same time, the generalization capability of the bin-
Q ðz; aÞ ¼ S ak fk ðzÞ ð2Þ
ary SVM classifier is often guaranteed by bounds from Statistical
k¼1
Learning Theory like the one reported in Appendix A, since it can
(where S : R ! R is the Heaviside step function, defined as be shown that the formulation of the optimization problem (4) is
 closely related to such bounds.
0; x 6 0;
SðxÞ ¼ ð3Þ
1; x > 0
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