Data Mining Techniques to Improve Early Warning Systems across the Bay of Bengal

This chapter is a conceptual contribution to this book on data mining applications upholding ethical issues related to two extremely important aspects of the Bangladeshi population: the early warning system and the disaster management system. The chapter tries to provide a few conceptual ideas to introduce ethical data mining application in these systems to support the agencies that are involved for an improved, efficient, and transparent support system in the country, especially across the Bay of Bengal. Resembling a triangular shape (deltaic), a major portion of the bay touches the southern portion of Bangladesh. Sediments from rivers have made the bay a shallow sea. Due to its shallowness and shape, monsoon rains and cyclone storms become destructive, causing great loss of life along the southern part of the country. Moreover, the three mighty rivers (Padma, Jamuna, and Meghna) form one of the largest river systems in the world. They have a large number of distributaries and tributaries, which cause a major portion of the country to be inundated by monsoon rain. In addition, being the lowest landing zone of the Himalayan water, Bangladesh becomes victim to floods almost every year. Loss of lives, destruction of properties, suffering of numerous people and hampering of economic development have become part and parcel of Bangladeshi communities. This chapter suggests that the newly emerged data mining techniques can be introduced to collect, synthesize, analyze, archive, disseminate, and even make future forecasts forming a reliable early warning system across the Bay of Bengal.