Landslide susceptibility assessment using feature selection-based machine learning models

Abstract

Machine learning models have been widely used for landslide susceptibility assessment (LSA) in recent years. The large number of inputs or conditioning factors for these models, however, can reduce the computation efficiency and increase the difficulty in collecting data. Feature selection is a good tool to address this problem by selecting the most important features among all factors to reduce the size of the input variables. However, two important questions need to be solved: (1) how do feature selection methods affect the performance of machine learning models? and (2) which feature selection method is the most suitable for a given machine learning model? This paper aims to address these two questions by comparing the predictive performance of 13 feature selection-based machine learning (FS-ML) models and 5 ordinary machine learning models on LSA. First, five commonly used machine learning models (i.e., logistic regression, support vector machine, artificial neural network, Gaussian process and random forest) and six typical feature selection methods in the literature are adopted to constitute the proposed models. Then, fifteen conditioning factors are chosen as input variables and 1,017 landslides are used as recorded data. Next, feature selection methods are used to obtain the importance of the conditioning factors to create feature subsets, based on which 13 FS-ML models are constructed. For each of the machine learning models, a best optimized FS-ML model is selected according to the area under curve value. Finally, five optimal FS-ML models are obtained and applied to the LSA of the studied area. The predictive abilities of the FS-ML models on LSA are verified and compared through the receive operating characteristic curve and statistical indicators such as sensitivity, specificity and accuracy. The results showed that different feature selection methods have different effects on the performance of LSA machine learning models. FS-ML models generally outperform the ordinary machine learning models. The best FS-ML model is the recursive feature elimination (RFE) optimized RF, and RFE is an optimal method for feature selection.