A hybrid ensemble method for improved prediction of slope stability

Accurate prediction of slope stability is a significant issue in geomechanics with many artificial intelligence (AI) techniques being utilised. However, the application of AI has not reached its full potential because of the lack of more robust algorithms. In this paper, we proposed a hybrid ensemble method for the improved prediction of slope stability using classifier ensembles and genetic algorithm. Gaussian process classification, quadratic discriminant analysis, support vector machine, artificial neural networks, adaptive boosted decision trees, and k-nearest neighbours were chosen to be individual AI techniques, and the weighted majority voting was used as the combination method. Validation method was chosen to be the 10-fold cross-validation, and performance measures were selected to be the accuracy, the receiver operating characteristic curve, and the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC). Grid search and genetic algorithm were used for the hyperparameter tuning and weight tuning respectively. The results show that the proposed hybrid ensemble method has great potential in improving the prediction of slope stability. Compared with individual classifiers, the optimum ensemble classifier achieved the highest AUC value (0.943) and the highest accuracy (0.902) on the testing set, denoting that the predictive performance has been improved. The optimum ensemble classifier with the Youden's cut-off was recommended for slope stability prediction with respect to the AUC value, the accuracy, the true positive rate, and the true negative rate. This research indicates that the use of the classifier ensembles, rather than the search for the ideal individual classifiers, might help for the slope stability prediction.