A novel voting ensemble model for spatial prediction of landslides using GIS

Abstract

ABSTRACTInherent complex topography and drastic weather patterns together have concocted various natural disasters worldwide. In difficult terrains such as those prevalent in the North-Eastern regions of India, coupled with the factors such as population explosion and improper land use, lead them to witness some of the world’s most drastic landslides with an astonishing frequency, reckoning landslide susceptibility assessment crucial in such regions. This paper focuses on exploring a promising machine learning ensemble technique of Majority-based voting which has seldom been employed for landslide susceptibility assessment. The ensemble comprises Logistic Regression (LR), Gradient Boosted Decision Trees (GBDT) and Voting Feature Interval (VFI) to prepare landslide susceptibility zonation maps for the Brahmaputra valley region (Assam & Nagaland) and its close vicinity. In the first stage of the study, a landslide inventory for the area comprising 436 landslide locations was prepared in geographic information system (GIS), substantiated by news reports and remote sensing data. In the second stage, 16 landslide causative thematic maps including Elevation, Slope, Slope Aspect, General Curvature, Plan Curvature, Profile Curvature, Surface Roughness, Topographic Wetness Index (TWI), Stream Power Index (SPI), Slope Length, Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Land Use/Land Cover (LULC), Distance from Roads, Rivers, Faults and Railways were prepared. In the third stage, the landslide inventory was annexed with the causative factor maps to obtain a dataset comprising coordinates of the locations and the values of aforementioned causative factors on the corresponding coordinates. The proposed model was then trained and tested on the prepared dataset (70%:30% split). Finally, the efficiency of the new model was tested using the area under receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC of ROC). The validation results demonstrate the mettle of the proposed majority-based voting ensemble LR-GBDT-VFI (AUC: 0.98) against the conventional techniques such as Decision Trees, Support Vector Machines, Random Forest, etc. Altogether, the study offers an approach with wide scope across the field of landslide hazard assessment.