Fire Detection and Risk Assessment via Support Vector Regression with Flattening-Samples Based Augmented Regularization

We propose a Hybrid Support Vector Regression (SVR) with Flattening-Samples Based Augmented Regularization (Hybrid FSR-SVR) architecture for multi-sensor fire detection and forest fire risk assessment. The Hybrid FSR-SVR is a lightweight architecture built upon the novel Flattening-Samples Based Augmented Regularization (FSR) approach and temporal trends of environmental variables. The FSR approach augments l2 norm based smoothing term into an l1-l2 combination, facilitating the integration of l1 regularization into the SVR method, thereby enhancing generalization with minimal computational load. We evaluate the performance of Hybrid FSR-SVR using two distinct datasets covering indoor and forest fires, benchmarking against 15 machine learning models, including state-of-the-art techniques, such as Recurrent Trend Predictive Neural Network (rTPNN), Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM), Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), and Gradient Boosting. Our findings demonstrate that Hybrid FSR-SVR effectively assesses the risk of forest fire, enabling early preventive measures. Notably, it achieves a remarkable accuracy of 0.95 for forest fire detection and ranks third with 0.88 accuracy for indoor fire detection. Importantly, it exhibits computation times significantly lower – by 1 to 2 orders of magnitude – than the majority of compared techniques. The superior generalization ability of Hybrid FSR-SVR, facilitated by flattening-samples based augmented regularization, allows for high detection performance even with smaller training sets.