Spatial predictions of debris flow susceptibility mapping using convolutional neural networks in Jilin province, China

Abstract

Debris flows are a major geological disaster that can seriously threaten human life and physical infrastructures. The main contribution of this paper is the establishment of two-dimensional convolutional neural networks (2D-CNN) models by using SAME padding (S-CNN) and VALID padding (V-CNN) and comparing them with support vector machine (SVM) and artificial neural network (ANN) models, respectively, to predict the spatial probability of debris flows in Jilin Province, China. First, the dataset is randomly divided into a training set (70%) and a validation set (30%), and thirteen influencing factors are selected to build the models. Then, multicollinearity analysis and gain ratio methods are used to quantify the predictive ability of factors. Finally, the area under the receiver operatic characteristic curve (AUC) and statistical methods are utilized to measure the accuracy of the models. The results show that the S-CNN model gets the highest AUC value of 0.901 in the validation set, followed by the SVM model, the V-CNN model, and the ANN model. Three statistical methods also show that the S-CNN model produces minimum errors compared with other models. The S-CNN model is hailed as an important means to improve the accuracy of debris-flow susceptibility mapping and provides a reasonable scientific basis for critical decisions.