Spatial prediction of landslide susceptibility based on GIS and discriminant functions

Abstract

The areas where landslides occur frequently pose severe threats to the local population, which necessitates conducting regional landslide susceptibility mapping (LSM). In this study, four models including weight-of-evidence (WoE) and three WoE-based models, which were linear discriminant analysis (LDA), Fisher’s linear discriminant analysis (FLDA), and quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA), were used to obtain the LSM in the Nanchuan region of Chongqing, China. Firstly, a dataset was prepared from sixteen landslide causative factors, including eight topographic factors, three distance-related factors, and five environmental factors. A landslide inventory map including 298 landslide locations was also constructed and randomly divided with a ratio of 70:30 as training and validation data. Subsequently, the WoE method was used to estimate the relationship between landslides and the landslide causative factors, which assign a weight value to each class of causative factors. Finally, four models were applied using the training dataset, and the predictive performance of each model was compared using the validation datasets. The results showed that FLDA had a higher performance than the other three models according to the success rate curve (SRC) and prediction rate curve (PRC), illustrating that it could be considered a promising approach for landslide susceptibility mapping in the study area.