Assessment of advanced random forest and decision tree algorithms for modeling rainfall-induced landslide susceptibility in the Izu-Oshima Volcanic Island, Japan

Abstract

Landslides represent a part of the cascade of geological hazards in a wide range of geo-environments. In this study, we aim to investigate and compare the performance of two state-of-the-art machine learning models, i.e., decision tree (DT) and random forest (RF) approaches to model the massive rainfall-triggered landslide occurrences in the Izu-Oshima Volcanic Island, Japan at a regional scale. At first, a landslide inventory map is prepared consisting of 44 landslide polygons (10,444 pixels) from aerial photo-interpretation and field surveys. To estimate the robustness of the models, we randomly adapted two different samples (S1 and S2), comprising of both positive and negative cells (70% of total landslides - 7293 pixels) for training and remaining (30%–3151 pixels) for validation. Twelve causative factors including altitude, slope angle, slope aspect, plan curvature, total curvature, compound topographic index, stream power index, distance to drainage network, drainage density, distance to geological boundaries, lithology and cumulative rainfall were selected as predictors to implement the landslide susceptibility model. The area under the receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curves (AUC) and other statistical signifiers were used to verify the model accuracies. The result shows that the DT and RF models achieved remarkable predictive performance (AUC > 0.9), producing near accurate susceptibility maps. The overall efficiency of RF (AUC = 0.956) is found significantly higher than the DT (AUC = 0.928) results. Additionally, we noticed that the performance of RF for modeling landslide susceptibility is very robust even though the training and validation samples are altered. Considering the performances, we suggest that both RF and DT models can be used in other similar non-eruption-related landslide studies in the tephra-deposited rich volcanoes, as they are capable of rapidly generating accurate and stable LSM maps for risk mitigation, management practices, and decision-making. Moreover, the RF-based model is promising and enough to be recommended as a method to map regional landslide susceptibility.