Landslide prediction with model switching

Abstract

Landslides could cause huge damages to properties and severe loss of lives. Landslides can be detected by analyzing the environmental data collected by wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, environmental data are usually complex and undergo rapid changes. Thus, if landslides can be predicted, people can leave the hazardous areas earlier. A good prediction mechanism is, thus, critical. Currently, a widely-used method is Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), which give accurate predictions and exhibit high learning ability. Through training, the ANN weight coefficients can be made precise enough such that the network works in analogy to a human brain. However, when there is an imbalanced distribution of data, an ANN will not be able to learn the pattern of the minority class; that is, the class having very few data samples. As a result, the predictions could be inaccurate. To overcome this shortcoming of ANNs, this work proposes a model switching strategy that can choose between different predictors, according to environmental states. In addition, ANN-based error models have also been designed to predict future errors from prediction models and to compensate for these errors in the prediction phase. As a result, our proposed method can improve prediction performance, and the landslide prediction system can give warnings, on average, 44.2 min prior to the occurrence of a landslide.