Improving the accuracy of landslide susceptibility model using a novel region-partitioning approach

Landslide is a natural disaster that threatens human lives and properties worldwide. Numerous have been conducted on landslide susceptibility mapping (LSM), in which each has attempted to improve the accuracy of final outputs. This study presents a novel region-partitioning approach for LSM to understand the effects of partitioning a focused region into smaller areas on the prediction accuracy of common regression models. Results showed that the partitioning of the study area into two regions using the proposed method improved the prediction rate from 0.77 to 0.85 when support vector machine was used, and from 0.87 to 0.88 when logistic regression model was utilized. The spatial agreements of the models were also improved after partitioning the area into two regions based on Shannon entropy equations. Our comparative study indicated that the proposed method outperformed the geographically weighted regression model that considered the spatial variations in landslide samples. Overall, the main advantages of the proposed method are improved accuracy and the reduction of the effects of spatial variations exhibited in landslide-conditioning factors.