GIS-based landslide susceptibility modeling using data mining techniques

Abstract

Introduction: Landslide is one of the most widespread geohazards around the world. Therefore, it is necessary and meaningful to map regional landslide susceptibility for landslide mitigation. In this research, landslide susceptibility maps were produced by four models, namely, certainty factors (CF), naive Bayes (NB), J48 decision tree (J48), and multilayer perceptron (MLP) models. Methods: In the first step, 328 landslides were identified via historical data, interpretation of remote sensing images, and field investigation, and they were divided into two subsets that were assigned different uses: 70% subset for training and 30% subset for validating. Then, twelve conditioning factors were employed, namely, altitude, slope angle, slope aspect, plan curvature, profile curvature, TWI, NDVI, distance to rivers, distance to roads, land use, soil, and lithology. Later, the importance of each conditioning factor was analyzed by average merit (AM) values, and the relationship between landslide occurrence and various factors was evaluated using the certainty factor (CF) approach. In the next step, the landslide susceptibility maps were produced based on four models, and the effect of the four models were quantitatively compared by receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves, area under curve (AUC) values, and non-parametric tests. Results: The results demonstrated that all the four models can reasonably assess landslide susceptibility. Of these four models, the CF model has the best predictive performance for the training (AUC=0.901) and validating data (AUC=0.892). Discussion: The proposed approach is an innovative method that may also help other scientists to develop landslide susceptibility maps in other areas and that could be used for geo-environmental problems besides natural hazard assessments.