Online Urban Waterlogging Monitoring Based on Recurrent Neural Network for Classification of Microblogging Text

Abstract. With the global climate change and rapid urbanization, urban flood disaster spreads and becomes increasingly serious in China. The urban rainstorm and waterlogging have become an urgent challenge that needs to be real-time monitored and further predicted for the improvement of urbanization construction. In this paper, we trained a recurrent neural network (RNN) model to classify microblogging posts related to urban waterlogging, and establish an online monitoring system of urban waterlogging caused by flood disaster. We manually curated more than 4,400 waterlogging posts to train the RNN model so that it can precisely identify waterlogging-related posts of Sina Weibo to timely find out urban waterlogging. The RNN model has been thoroughly evaluated, and our experimental results showed that it achieved higher accuracy than traditional machine learning methods, such as SVM and GBDT. Furthermore, we build a nationwide map of urban waterlogging based on recent two-year microblogging data.