An ensemble deep-learning framework for landslide susceptibility assessment using multiple blocks: a case study of Wenchuan area, China

Abstract

The improvement of the landslide susceptibility mapping (LSM) is a long-standing problem, as it provides basics for hazard mitigation. Recently, hybrid ensemble deep learning (DL) techniques have witnessed the potential for this purpose. In this paper, we proposed a novel ensemble DL model, namely GL-ResNet, which employs the conventional ResNet blocks for landslide feature extraction, long-short term memory (LSTM) structures for information storage, and a proposed GoogLeNet block (GBlk) to broaden model perception ability. To validate the model performance, a landslide inventory containing 1147 historical landslide polygons and the data of 12 landslide factors in the Wenchuan area in southwestern China, was presented and separated into training and validating dataset using a 7:3 randomly sampling ratio strategy. Based on AUC and Accuracy, GL-ResNet (0.96 and 0.909) outperformed logistic regression (0.92 and 0.851), support vector machines (0.94 and 0.884), deep belief networks (0.95 and 0.884), gated recurrent unit (0.94 and 0.884) and ResNet (0.95 and 0.894). We also explored the robustness of GL-ResNet for LSM. The results suggested that although GL-ResNet is sensitive to initial training conditions, it showed good robustness to model training method and sample ratios. In detail, GL-ResNet outperformed the conventional models in terms of fitting power and prediction performance by 0.03-0.04 and 0.02 respectively in most cases, with even greater differences in the limited training dataset.