Fire risk assessment with scoring system, using the support vector machine approach

An accurate and comprehensive fire risk assessment is very important in a civilized society which provides the stakeholders with the likelihood of fire outbreaks, a rough estimation of people at risk and property losses. Hence, the government can better allocate resources for fire protection strategies. Much research has been carried out on assessment of residential fire risk objectively and quantitatively. These works can be complemented so that the assessment task can be more comprehensive and systematic. This paper proposes a fire risk scorecard based on a scoring system used in banking and insurance industry. Different fire risk factors are weighed by Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). Then, industrial and non-industrial buildings are treated as borrowers, the fire risk of each building is assessed and its risk level is identified. Finally, real data are applied to test the fire risk scorecard. The results of the scorecard and support vector machine (SVM) model are then proved to be effective.