Conclusions and Future Research Directions

This book discusses natural disaster prediction methods by analysing the state changes of the dynamics behind natural disasters. It shows that many such state changes behave as random walks in their respective state spaces. Therefore, this book mainly focusses on methods that predict the \(\textit{MFPT}\) for random walks resulting from natural processes leading to natural disasters viewed in an engineering perspective. The main objective of this book is to address network inhomogeneity and directional bias that affect random walks’ \(\textit{MFPT}\) calculations. The motivation behind this discussion is the large class of process behind natural disaster dynamics of which the state transitions translate to random walks where the non-linear interactions with the environment result in biased random walks showing inhomogeneous transport characteristics.