Comparison and evaluation of landslide susceptibility maps obtained from weight of evidence, logistic regression, and artificial neural network models

The main purpose of this study is to compare the performance of two statistical analysis models like weight of evidence and logistic regression (LR) with a soft computing model like artificial neural networks for landslide susceptibility assessment. These models were applied for the Selinous River drainage basin (northern Peloponnese, Greece) in order to map landslide susceptibility and rate the importance of landslide causal factors. A landslide inventory was prepared using satellite imagery interpretation and field surveys. Eight causal factors including altitude, slope angle, slope aspect, distance to road network, distance to drainage network, distance to tectonic elements, land cover, and lithology were considered. Model performance was tested with receiver operator characteristic analysis. The validation findings revealed that the three models show promising results since they give good accuracy values. However, the LR model proved to be relatively superior in estimating landslide susceptibility throughout the study area.