Multimodal Deep Survival Analysis for Sinkhole Susceptibility
Lucas Yuan, Minhee Kim, Zihan Li, Chunli Dai, Sanduni S. Disanayaka Mudiyanselage, Ming Ye, Kani Fu
Abstract
Sinkholes are a widespread geohazard in karst terrain. In Florida, soluble carbonate bedrock, shallow groundwater, and intense rainfall combine to make subsidence both common and spatially heterogeneous. Predicting where and when sinkholes will occur is difficult for two reasons. First, locations without reported sinkholes cannot be directly labeled or sampled as true negative locations. Second, the potential factors governing sinkhole risk span heterogeneous data modalities and therefore require careful integration within a unified modeling framework. We address both problems with our proposed model, a multimodal Cox proportional hazards framework for sinkhole susceptibility. Our contributions are threefold. First, we extend the proportional-hazards formulation to heterogeneous multimodal input through modality-specific encoders and a cross-modal fusion layer. Second, we treat unreported locations as right-censored rather than negative, avoiding hard-negative labeling and yielding continuous, time-aware susceptibility from the predicted survival function. Third, a statewide Florida case study with spatially blocked validation and ablation studies quantifies the benefit of multimodal integration. A Florida case study demonstrates that the proposed method effectively ranks sinkhole risk and produces a statewide susceptibility map that captures spatial variations in sinkhole occurrence.