Mapping landslide susceptibility with logistic regression, multiple adaptive regression splines, classification and regression trees, and maximum entropy methods: a comparative study

Abstract

Four statistical techniques for modelling landslide susceptibility were compared: multiple logistic regression (MLR), multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS), classification and regression trees (CART), and maximum entropy (MAXENT). According to the literature, MARS and MAXENT have never been used in landslide susceptibility modelling, and CART has been used only twice. Twenty independent variables were used as predictors, including lithology as a categorical variable. Two sets of random samples were used, for a total of 90 model replicates (with and without lithology, and with different proportions of positive and negative data). The model performance was evaluated using the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) statistic. The main results are (a) the inclusion of lithology improves the model performance; (b) the best AUC values for single models are MLR (0.76), MARS (0.76), CART (0.77), and MAXENT (0.78); (c) a smaller amount of negative data provides better results; (d) the models with the highest prediction capability are obtained with MAXENT and CART; and (e) the combination of different models is a way to evaluate the model reliability. We further discuss some key issues in landslide modelling, including the influence of the various methods that we used, the sample size, and the random replicate procedures.