Postearthquake Casualty Prediction Based on Heatmaps and Wavelet Supporting Vector Machines

The prediction of casualties in earthquakes is very important for improving the efficiency of emergency rescue measures and reducing the number of casualties. Given the time lag and poor accuracy of population density data published in statistical yearbooks, a Baidu heatmap is used in this study to accurately estimate the regional population density. Based on the standard support vector machine (SVM) prediction model, a piecewise loss function and a robust wavelet kernel function are proposed to effectively reduce the prediction error. Given a characteristic attribute set of factors related to earthquake casualties, the new prediction model is tested in 34 cases involving earthquake cases on the Chinese mainland since 2011. Compared with other prediction techniques, the proposed robust wavelet SVM can converge more quickly, and the prediction error is lower than that of the standard backpropagation neural network (BPNN) and standard SVM.