Disaster Damage Estimation from Real-time Population Dynamics using Graph Convolutional Network (Industrial Paper)

Storm and flood disasters such as typhoons and torrential rains are becoming more intense and frequent. The national government and municipalities must respond to such natural disasters as soon as possible. When the scale of damage is large; however, it takes much time to investigate the severity of damage, and the initial response can be delayed. If we could precisely and rapidly estimate the severity of damage for each city at an early stage, the national government would be able to better support the municipalities, and consequently respond quickly to help citizens. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to estimate the severity of disaster damage within a short time period after a disaster occurs by exploiting real-time population data generated from cellular networks. First, we investigate the relationship between real-time population data and the severity of damage. Then, we design a Graph Convolutional Networks for Disaster Damage Estimation, called D2E-GCN, which fully exploits the directed and weighted characteristics of human mobility graph. We conduct an offline evaluation on real-world datasets including two typhoons that hit Japan. The evaluation results show that the proposed method outperforms baseline methods which do not consider the graph structure of cities, and the proposed method can estimate the severity of damage approximately 48 hours after typhoons passed. Moreover, we find the experimental insight that the estimation performance can be significantly affected by the graph construction method for GCN models.