Work place: Department of Computer Engineering, Mukesh Patel School of Technology Management & Engineering, SVKM's Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies (NMIMS) Deemed-to-University Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
E-mail: Prashasti.Kanikar@nmims.edu
Website:
Research Interests:
Biography
Prashasti Kanikar received a B.E. (Computer Science and Engg.) from RGPV Bhopal, M.Tech. and a Ph.D. in Computer Engg. from NMIMS, Mumbai in 2001, 2012, and 2023, respectively. She has worked as an information scientist at MGCGV, M.P., and on UGC's INFLIBNET project. She has around 20 years of experience in teaching. She has guided six projects at M.Tech. Level, more than 50 projects at B.Tech. Level and is guiding two doctoral research scholars now. Currently, she is working as an Assistant Professor and Program Coordinator in the Department of Computer Engineering at NMIMS, Mumbai. Her areas of interest are Machine Learning, Data Mining, and Healthcare Informatics.
By Saket Sultania Rohit Sonawane Prashasti Kanikar
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5815/ijitcs.2025.01.01, Pub. Date: 8 Feb. 2025
Wildfires are increasingly destructive natural disasters, annually consuming millions of acres of forests and vegetation globally. The complex interactions among fuels, topography, and meteorological factors, including temperature, precipitation, humidity, and wind, govern wildfire ignition and spread. This research presents a framework that integrates satellite remote sensing and numerical weather prediction model data to refine estimations of final wildfire sizes. A key strength of our approach is the use of comprehensive geospatial datasets from the IBM PAIRS platform, which provides a robust foundation for our predictions. We implement machine learning techniques through the AutoGluon automated machine learning toolkit to determine the optimal model for burned area prediction. AutoGluon automates the process of feature engineering, model selection, and hyperparameter tuning, evaluating a diverse range of algorithms, including neural networks, gradient boosting, and ensemble methods, to identify the most effective predictor for wildfire area estimation. The system features an intuitive interface developed in Gradio, which allows the incorporation of key input parameters, such as vegetation indices and weather variables, to customize wildfire projections. Interactive Plotly visualizations categorize the predicted fire severity levels across regions. This study demonstrates the value of synergizing Earth observations from spaceborne instruments and forecast data from numerical models to strengthen real-time wildfire monitoring and postfire impact assessment capabilities for improved disaster management. We optimize an ensemble model by comparing various algorithms to minimize the root mean squared error between the predicted and actual burned areas, achieving improved predictive performance over any individual model. The final metric reveals that our optimized WeightedEnsemble model achieved a root mean squared error (RMSE) of 1.564 km2 on the test data, indicating an average deviation of approximately 1.2 km2 in the predictions.
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