Sentimental wildfire: a social-physics machine learning model for wildfire nowcasting
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Published version
Author(s)
Lever, Jake
Arcucci, Rossella
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
The intensity of wildfires and wildfire season length is increasing due to climate change, causing a greater threat to the local population. Much of this population are increasingly adopting social media, and sites like Twitter are increasingly being used as a real-time human-sensor network during natural disasters; detecting, tracking and documenting events. The human-sensor concept is currently largely omitted by wildfire models, representing a potential loss of information. By including Twitter data as a source in our models, we aim to help disaster managers make more informed, socially driven decisions, by detecting and monitoring online social media sentiment over the course of a wildfire event. This paper implements machine learning in a wildfire prediction model, using social media and geophysical data sources with Sentiment Analysis to predict wildfire characteristics with high accuracy. We also use wildfire-specific attributes to predict online social dynamics, as this has been shown to be indicative of localised disaster severity. This may be useful for disaster management teams in identifying areas of immediate danger. We combine geophysical satellite data from the Global Fire Atlas with social data provided by Twitter. We perform data collection and subsequent analysis & visualisation, and compare regional differences in online social sentiment expression. Following this, we compare and contrast different machine learning models for predicting wildfire attributes. We demonstrate social media is a predictor of wildfire activity, and present models which accurately model wildfire attributes. This work develops the concept of the human sensor in the context of wildfires, using users’ Tweets as noisy subjective sentimental accounts of current localised conditions. This work contributes to the development of more socially conscious wildfire models, by incorporating social media data into wildfire prediction and modelling.
Date Issued
2022-07-22
Date Acceptance
2022-06-30
Citation
Journal of Computational Social Science, 2022, 5, pp.1427-1465
ISSN
2432-2717
Publisher
Springer
Start Page
1427
End Page
1465
Journal / Book Title
Journal of Computational Social Science
Volume
5
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2022. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
License URL
Identifier
https://www.webofscience.com/api/gateway?GWVersion=2&SrcApp=PARTNER_APP&SrcAuth=LinksAMR&KeyUT=WOS:000828958700001&DestLinkType=FullRecord&DestApp=ALL_WOS&UsrCustomerID=1ba7043ffcc86c417c072aa74d649202
Subjects
Social Sciences
Social Sciences, Mathematical Methods
Mathematical Methods In Social Sciences
Machine learning
Social media
Wildfires
Sentiment analysis
Twitter data
Satellite data
FIRE SPREAD
Publication Status
Published
Date Publish Online
2022-07-22