A Synergistic Optimization Algorithm with Attribute and Instance Weighting Approach for Effective Drought Prediction in Tamil Nadu

The creation of frameworks for lowering natural hazards is a sustainable development goal specified by the United Nations. This study aims to predict drought occurrence in Tamil Nadu, India, using 26 years of data, with only 3 drought years. Since the drought-occurrence years are minimal, it is an imbalanced dataset, which gives a suboptimal classification performance. The accuracy metric has a tendency to produce misleadingly high results by focusing on the accuracy of forecasting the majority class while ignoring the minority class; hence, this work considers the metrics’ precision and recall. A novel strategy uses attribute (or instance) weighting, which allots weights to attributes (or instances) based on their importance, to improve precision and recall. These weights are found using a bio-inspired optimization algorithm, by designing its fitness function to improve precision and recall of the minority (drought) class. Since increasing precision and recall is a tug-of-war, multi-objective optimization helps to identify optimal attribute (or instance) weight balancing precision and recall while maximizing both. The newly introduced Synergistic Optimization Algorithm (SOA) is utilized for multi-objective optimization in order to ascertain weights for attributes (or instances). In SOA, to solve multi-objective optimization, each objective’s population was generated using three distinct algorithms, namely, the Genetic, Firefly, and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithms. The experimental results demonstrated that the prediction performance for the minority drought class was superior when utilizing instance (or attribute) weighting compared to the approach not employing attribute/instance weighting. The Gradient Boosting classifier with an attribute-weighted dataset achieved precision and recall values of 0.92 and 0.79, whereas, with instance weighting, the values were 0.9 and 0.76 for the drought class. The attribute weighting shows that in addition to the default drought indices SPI and SPEI, pollution factors and mean sea level rise are valuable indicators in drought prediction. From instance weighting, it is inferred that the instances of the months of March, April, July, and August contribute most to drought prediction.