TY  - JOUR
A1  - Schoppa, Lukas
A1  - Sieg, Tobias
A1  - Vogel, Kristin
A1  - Zöller, Gert
A1  - Kreibich, Heidi
T1  - Probabilistic flood loss models for companies
JF  - Water resources research
N2  - Flood loss modeling is a central component of flood risk analysis. Conventionally, this involves univariable and deterministic stage-damage functions. Recent advancements in the field promote the use of multivariable and probabilistic loss models, which consider variables beyond inundation depth and account for prediction uncertainty. Although companies contribute significantly to total loss figures, novel modeling approaches for companies are lacking. Scarce data and the heterogeneity among companies impede the development of company flood loss models. We present three multivariable flood loss models for companies from the manufacturing, commercial, financial, and service sector that intrinsically quantify prediction uncertainty. Based on object-level loss data (n = 1,306), we comparatively evaluate the predictive capacity of Bayesian networks, Bayesian regression, and random forest in relation to deterministic and probabilistic stage-damage functions, serving as benchmarks. The company loss data stem from four postevent surveys in Germany between 2002 and 2013 and include information on flood intensity, company characteristics, emergency response, private precaution, and resulting loss to building, equipment, and goods and stock. We find that the multivariable probabilistic models successfully identify and reproduce essential relationships of flood damage processes in the data. The assessment of model skill focuses on the precision of the probabilistic predictions and reveals that the candidate models outperform the stage-damage functions, while differences among the proposed models are negligible. Although the combination of multivariable and probabilistic loss estimation improves predictive accuracy over the entire data set, wide predictive distributions stress the necessity for the quantification of uncertainty.
KW  - flood loss estimation
KW  - probabilistic modeling
KW  - companies
KW  - multivariable
KW  - models
Y1  - 2020
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1029/2020WR027649
SN  - 0043-1397
SN  - 1944-7973
VL  - 56
IS  - 9
PB  - American Geophysical Union
CY  - Washington
ER  -