KPCA over PCA to assess urban resilience to floods

¹ Geosciences, Water and Environment Laboratory Mohammed V University in Rabat, Morocco.
² National Institute of Statistics and Applied Economics, Rabat, Morocco.
³ Murray Foundation, Brabners LLP, Horton House, Exchange Street, Liverpool L2 3YL, UK
⁴ CIMA, FCT-Gambelas Campus, University of Algarve, 8005-139 Faro, Portugal

^* Corresponding author: narjiss.satour@gmail.com

Abstract

Global increases in the occurrence and frequency of flood have highlighted the need for resilience approaches to deal with future floods. The principal component analysis (PCA) has been used widely to understand the resilience of the urban system to floods. Based on feature extraction and dimensionality reduction, the PCA reduces datasets to representations consisting of principal components. Kernel PCA (KPCA) is the nonlinear form of PCA, which efficiently presents a complicated data in a lower dimensional space. In this work the KPCA techniques was applied to measure and map flood resilience across a local level. Therefore, it aims to improve the performance achieved by non-linear PCA application, compared to standard PCA. Twenty-one resilience indicators were gathered, including social, economic, physical, and natural components into a composite index (Flood resilience Index). The experimental results demonstrate the KPCA performance to get a better Flood Resilience Index, guiding q decision making to strengthen the flood resilience in our case of study of M’diq-Fnideq and martil municipalities in Northern of Morocco.