Examining the Spatially Varying Relationships between Landslide Susceptibility and Conditioning Factors Using a Geographical Random Forest Approach: A Case Study in Liangshan, China

Abstract

Landslide susceptibility assessment is an important means of helping to reduce and manage landslide risk. The existing studies, however, fail to examine the spatially varying relationships between landslide susceptibility and its explanatory factors. This paper investigates the spatial variation in such relationships in Liangshan, China, leveraging a spatially explicit model, namely, geographical random forest (GRF). By comparing with random forest (RF), we found that GRF achieves a higher performance with an AUC of 0.86 due to its consideration of the spatial heterogeneity among variables. GRF also provides a higher-quality landslide susceptibility map than RF by correctly placing 92.35% of the landslide points in high-susceptibility areas. The local feature importance derived from GRF allows us to understand that the impact of conditioning factors varies across space, which can provide implications for policy development by local governments to place different levels of attention on different conditioning factors in specific counties to prevent and mitigate landslides. To account for the spatial dependence among the data in the model performance assessment, we use spatial cross-validation (CV) to split the data into subsets spatially rather than randomly for model training and testing. The results show that spatial CV can effectively address the over-optimistic bias in model error evaluation.