Landslide Susceptibility Assessment Based on Different MaChine Learning Methods in Zhaoping County of Eastern Guangxi

Regarding the ever increasing and frequent occurrence of serious landslide disaster in eastern Guangxi, the current study was implemented to adopt support vector machines (SVM), particle swarm optimization support vector machines (PSO-SVM), random forest (RF), and particle swarm optimization random forest (PSO-RF) methods to assess landslide susceptibility in Zhaoping County. To this end, 10 landslide disaster-related variables including digital elevation model (DEM)-derived, meteorology-derived, Landsat8-derived, geology-derived, and human activities factors were provided. Of 345 landslide disaster locations found, 70% were used to train the models, and the rest of them were performed for model verification. The aforementioned four models were run, and landslide susceptibility evaluation maps were produced. Then, receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curves, statistical analysis, and field investigation were performed to test and verify the efficiency of these models. Analysis and comparison of the results denoted that all four landslide models performed well for the landslide susceptibility evaluation as indicated by the area under curve (AUC) values of ROC curves from 0.863 to 0.934. Among them, it has been shown that the PSO-RF model has the highest accuracy in comparison to other landslide models, followed by the PSO-SVM model, the RF model, and the SVM model. Moreover, the results also showed that the PSO algorithm has a good effect on SVM and RF models. Furthermore, the landslide models devolved in the present study are promising methods that could be transferred to other regions for landslide susceptibility evaluation. In addition, the evaluation results can provide suggestions for disaster reduction and prevention in Zhaoping County of eastern Guangxi.

Automated summary

This study used different models to evaluate landslide susceptibility in Zhaoping County, and found that the PSO-RF model had the highest accuracy. The PSO algorithm had a good effect on the SVM and RF models, and all four models performed well for landslide susceptibility evaluation.