Deep spatio-temporal learning for multi-hazard events: A ConvGRU multi-label classification approach
Year of publication
2026
Authors
Zahra, Syeda Zoupash; Saher, Najia; Sattar, Kalim; Missen, Malik Muhammad Saad; Bashir, Rab Nawaz; Faheem, Muhammad; Rehman, Amjad
Abstract
The forecasting of multi-hazards is a vital, though underinvestigated, area of disaster risk management. The traditional studies have mainly focused on single-hazard forecasting, thus leaving its utility in real-world and realistic scenarios. This study, in turn, presents a spatio-temporal multi-label classification model, a framework designed expressly to capture the complex interrelationships between a range of hazards. The methodological framework used disaster occurrence data from the Open Federal Emergency Management Agency (OpenFEMA) database and converted the raw records of disasters into a multi-label dataset. Pressure-level reanalysis data is extracted from Climate Data Store (CDS) based on the multi-hazard event. Spatial data is extracted in 25 <br/> 59 grid format in different temporal dependencies (12 h, 8 h, 6 h) at the 850 hPa pressure level. The model architecture combines convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with spatial attention mechanisms and gated recurrent units (GRUs) that model the temporal sequences. This combination enables multi-hazard predictions by utilizing the spatial and temporal data. Experimental analysis reveals that the proposed model outperformed the baseline variants, i.e., 2D CNN, Convolutional Long Short-Term Memory (ConvLSTM), and Convolutional Gated Recurrent Unit (ConvGRU) without attention. The proposed model achieved per-class accuracy up to 0.8868, the subset accuracy is 0.55, and the Hamming loss up to 0.127, which are 3.88%, 13.59% and 21.12% performance improvements over the baseline models respectively. In addition, the use of various lead times and the fusion of multiple lead times (12 h+8 h+6 h) significantly improves the predictive capability. The proposed framework has high potential for disaster preparedness and early warning systems in the real world. It proposes a flexible and efficient method of dealing with the growing complexity of multi-hazard environments.
Show moreOrganizations and authors
VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd
Faheem Muhammad
Publication type
Publication format
Article
Parent publication type
Journal
Article type
Original article
Audience
ScientificPeer-reviewed
Peer-ReviewedMINEDU's publication type classification code
A1 Journal article (refereed), original researchPublication channel information
Journal/Series
Volume
30
Article number
8
ISSN
Publication forum
Publication forum level
1
Open access
Open access in the publisher’s service
Yes
Open access of publication channel
Partially open publication channel
License of the publisher’s version
CC BY
Self-archived
No
Other information
Fields of science
Electronic, automation and communications engineering, electronics
Keywords
[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object]
Identified topic
[object Object]
Language
English
International co-publication
Yes
Co-publication with a company
No
DOI
10.1007/s10707-026-00568-0
The publication is included in the Ministry of Education and Culture’s Publication data collection
Yes