Selection of contributing factors for predicting landslide susceptibility using machine learning and deep learning models
This work addresses the challenge of improving landslide susceptibility predictions for disaster management, but it is incremental as it applies existing selection methods to a specific domain.
The study investigated how selecting important landslide contributing factors affects prediction accuracy using machine learning and deep learning models, finding that factor selection methods like IGR and RFE improved accuracy, with specific models achieving up to 95% accuracy in some cases.
Landslides are a common natural disaster that can cause casualties, property safety threats and economic losses. Therefore, it is important to understand or predict the probability of landslide occurrence at potentially risky sites. A commonly used means is to carry out a landslide susceptibility assessment based on a landslide inventory and a set of landslide contributing factors. This can be readily achieved using machine learning (ML) models such as logistic regression (LR), support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF), extreme gradient boosting (Xgboost), or deep learning (DL) models such as convolutional neural network (CNN) and long short time memory (LSTM). As the input data for these models, landslide contributing factors have varying influences on landslide occurrence. Therefore, it is logically feasible to select more important contributing factors and eliminate less relevant ones, with the aim of increasing the prediction accuracy of these models. However, selecting more important factors is still a challenging task and there is no generally accepted method. Furthermore, the effects of factor selection using various methods on the prediction accuracy of ML and DL models are unclear. In this study, the impact of the selection of contributing factors on the accuracy of landslide susceptibility predictions using ML and DL models was investigated. Four methods for selecting contributing factors were considered for all the aforementioned ML and DL models, which included Information Gain Ratio (IGR), Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operators (LASSO) and Harris Hawk Optimization (HHO). In addition, autoencoder-based factor selection methods for DL models were also investigated. To assess their performances, an exhaustive approach was adopted,...