Dr. Jian Deng
Associate Professor, Department of Civil Engineering, Lakehead University, Canada
Dr. Jian Deng is currently an associate professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at Lakehead University, Ontario, Canada and an invited researcher in the Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Mining and Exploration of Canada. Dr. Deng is a licensed professional engineer (P.Eng.) in Canada and has over 20 years’ research, education, and industry experience. Dr. Deng is the author/co-author of more than 80 referred journal publications on the topics of structural reliability, extreme value analysis, and stability of structures in the areas of Civil and Geotechnical Engineering.

Speech Title: A Distribution-Free Method for Flood Frequency Analysis Using Maximum Entropy and Akaike Information Criterion

Abstract: Flood frequency analysis provides the fundamental information for the design of hydraulic and civil infrastructure facilities as well as water resources management. The available procedures to determine flood distributions and their parameters from historical data suffer from restriction on the family of presumed standard classical distributions, such as gamma distributions and extreme value distributions. This paper presents a distribution-free approach for flood frequency analysis by using the combination of maximum entropy principle and Akaike information criterion. The determination procedure is given in a flowchart. It is distribution-free because no classical distributions were presumed in advance and the inference result gives a universal form of probability curves. Comparative studies from historical flood data show that the proposed method can, accurately and reasonably, characterize the probabilistic information of observed or transformed flood data.