Forest fire is one of the foremost environmental disasters that threatens the Australian community. Recognition of the occurrence patterns of fires and the identification of fire risk is beneficial to mitigate probable fire threats. Machine learning techniques are recognized as well-known approaches to solving non-linearity problems such as forest fire risk. However, assessing such environmental multivariate disasters has always been challenging as modelling may be biased from multiple uncertainty sources such as the quality and quantity of input parameters, training processes, and a default setup for hyper-parameters. In this study, we propose a spatial framework to quantify the forest fire risk in the Northern Beaches area of Sydney. Thirty-six significant key indicators contributing to forest fire risk were selected and spatially mapped from different contexts such as topography, morphology, climate, human-induced, social, and physical perspectives as input to our model. Optimized deep neural networks were developed to maximize the capability of the multilayer perceptron for forest fire susceptibility assessment. The results show high precision of developed model against accuracy assessment metrics of ROC = 95.1%, PRC = 93.8%, and k coefficient = 94.3%. The proposed framework follows a stepwise procedure to run multiple scenarios to calculate the probability of forest risk with new input contributing parameters. This model improves adaptability and decision-making as it can be adapted to different regions of Australia with a minor localization adoption requirement of the weighting procedure.

Mobile telematics is a relatively new innovation that involves collecting data on driving behavior using the internal sensors in a smartphone rather than from an in-vehicle data recorder. However, telematics data are usually not labeled, which makes extracting driving patterns from them very difficult. Therefore, unsupervised learning algorithms play an important role in this field. In addition, most current research is based on datasets developed in a laboratory or from site investigations and questionnaires, which are very different from real-world driving behaviors. To advance unsupervised learning techniques in this field, and to fill the gap in findings based on real-world data, we have developed an unsupervised pattern recognition framework for mobile telematics data. The framework comprises three main components: a self-organizing map, a nine-layers deep auto-encoder, and partitive clustering algorithms. The SOM algorithm reduces the complexity of the data, the deep auto-encoder extracts the features, and the clustering algorithm groups driving events with similar patterns into behaviors. Further, given clustering with mobile telematics data is an under-researched area, we undertook an empirical comparison of five well-known clustering algorithms to determine the strengths and weaknesses of each method and which is best suited to categorizing driving styles. The study was conducted with a real-world insurance dataset containing 500,000 journeys by 2500 drivers, and the results were evaluated against three measures - Davis Boulding, Calinski Harabasz, and execution time. Overall, we find that k-means clustering and a self-organizing map were able to extract more accurate patterns than others. A statistical analysis of the 29 clusters produced by SOM and k-means, revealed 29 unique driving styles, all of which can be found in the transportation literature. The results from the study, with support from the corresponding literature review, demonstrate the efficacy of the presented framework in unsupervised settings. Additionally, the results provide a basis for developing a future risk analysis and automatic decision support system for usage-based insurance companies.