Evaluation of Landslide Susceptibility of Şavşat District of Artvin Province (Turkey) Using Machine Learning Techniques

Abstract

The aim of this study is to produce landslide susceptibility maps of Şavşat district of Artvin Province using machine learning (ML) models and to compare the predictive performances of the models used. Tree-based ensemble learning models, including random forest (RF), gradient boosting machines (GBM), and extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), were used in the study. A landslide inventory map consisting of 85 landslide polygons was used in the study. The inventory map comprises 32,777 landslide pixels at 30 m resolution. Randomly selected 70% of the landslide pixels were used for training the models and the remaining 30% were used for the validation of the models. In susceptibility analysis, altitude, aspect, curvature, distance to drainage network, distance to faults, distance to roads, land cover, lithology, slope, slope length, and topographic wetness index parameters were used. The validation of the models was conducted using success and prediction rate curves. The validation results showed that the success rates for the GBM, RF, and XGBoost models were 91.6%, 98.4%, and 98.6%, respectively, whereas the prediction rate were 91.4%, 97.9%, and 98.1%, respectively. Therefore, it was concluded that landslide susceptibility map produced with XGBoost model can help decision makers in reducing landslide-associated damages in the study area.