Natural disasters such as hurricanes are increasing and causing widespread devastation. People's decisions and actions regarding whether to evacuate or not are critical and have a large impact on emergency planning and response. Our interest lies in computationally modeling complex relationships among various factors influencing evacuation decisions. We conducted a study on the evacuation of Hurricane Irma of the 2017 Atlantic hurricane season. The study was guided by the Protection motivation theory (PMT), a widely-used framework to understand people's responses to potential threats. Graphical models were constructed to represent the complex relationships among the factors involved and the evacuation decision. We evaluated different graphical structures based on conditional independence tests using Irma data. The final model largely aligns with PMT. It shows that both risk perception (threat appraisal) and difficulties in evacuation (coping appraisal) influence evacuation decisions directly and independently. Certain information received from media was found to influence risk perception, and through it influence evacuation behaviors indirectly. In addition, several variables were found to influence both risk perception and evacuation behaviors directly, including family and friends' suggestions, neighbors' evacuation behaviors, and evacuation notices from officials.

翻译：诸如飓风等自然灾害日益增多，并造成广泛破坏。人们关于是否撤离的决策与行动至关重要，对应急规划与响应具有重大影响。我们的研究兴趣在于以计算模型刻画影响撤离决策的多种因素之间的复杂关系。我们针对2017年大西洋飓风季的厄玛飓风撤离事件开展了一项研究。该研究以保护动机理论（PMT）为指导，该理论是理解人们对潜在威胁反应的广泛使用框架。我们构建了图形化模型来表示相关因素与撤离决策之间的复杂关系。基于厄玛数据，我们采用条件独立性检验评估了不同的图形结构。最终模型与PMT基本吻合。模型表明：风险感知（威胁评估）与撤离困难（应对评估）均直接且独立地影响撤离决策。某些从媒体获取的信息被发现会通过影响风险感知，间接影响撤离行为。此外，家庭与朋友的建议、邻居的撤离行为以及官方发布的撤离通知等若干变量被发现同时直接作用于风险感知与撤离行为。