Assessment of the performance of GIS-based analytical hierarchical process (AHP) approach for flood modelling in Uttar Dinajpur district of West Bengal, India

Floods have received global significance in contemporary times due to their destructive behavior, which may wreak tremendous ruin on infrastructure and civilization. The present research employed an integration of the Geographic information system (GIS) and Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) method for identifying the flood susceptibility zonation (FSZ), flood vulnerability zonation (FVZ), and flood risk zonation (FRZ) of the humid subtropical Uttar Dinajpur district in India. The study combined a large number of thematic layers (<i>N</i> = 12 for FSZ and <i>N</i> = 9 for FVZ) to achieve reliable accuracy and included the multicollinearity analysis of these variables to overcome the issues related to highly correlated variables. According to the findings, 27.04, 15.62, and 4.59% of the area were classified as medium, high, and very high FRZ, respectively. The ROC-AUC, MAE, MSE, and RMSE of the model exhibited a good prediction accuracy of 0.73, 0.15, 0.16, and 0.21, respectively. The performance of the AHP model has been evaluated using sensitivity analyses. It also highly recommends that persistent improvement in this subject, such as sensitivity studies on modifying criteria thresholds, changing the relative significance of criteria, and changing the desired matrix, will permit GIS and MCDA to be progressively adapted to real hazard-management issues.