Determination of importance for comprehensive topographic factors on landslide hazard mapping using artificial neural network

Abstract

A landslide is one of the natural disasters that occur in Malaysia. In addition to the geological factor and the rain as triggering factor, topographic factors such as elevation, slope angle, slope aspect, and curvature are considered as the main causes of landslides. The study in this paper was conducted in three stages. The first stage involved the extraction of extra topographic factors. Previous landslide studies had identified only four of the topographic factors. However, eight new additional factors have also been identified in this study. They are general curvature, longitudinal curvature, tangential curvature, cross-section curvature, surface area, diagonal line length, surface roughness, and rugosity. At this stage, 13 factors were extracted from the digital elevation model. The second stage involved specifying the importance of each factor. The multilayer perceptron network and backpropagation algorithm were used to specify the weight of each factor. Results were verified using the receiver operating characteristics based on the area under the curve method in the third stage. The results indicated 76.07 % accuracy in predicting of landslides, with slope angle as the most important factor while the tangential curvature has the least importance.