Modeling landslide susceptibility using alternating decision tree and support vector

Abstract

Globally, but especially in the Chinese Loess Plateau, landslides are considered to be one of the most severe and significant geological hazards. The purpose of this study is to design two ensemble machine learning methods, which are denoted as ADTree-Dagging and SVM-Dagging, for modeling landslide susceptibility in Lanzhou City (China). For this aim, the slope units extracted by the curvature watersheds method are used to construct landslide susceptibility modeling, and ten landslide conditioning factors are included in the landslide susceptibility evaluation (altitude, slope angle, slope aspect, cutting depth, surface roughness, relief amplitude, gully density, rainfall, distance to roads, and lithology). The conditioning factors selection and spatial correlation analysis were implemented by using the correlation attribute evaluation method and the frequency ratio model. The comprehensive performance of the models was tested using the receiver operating characteristic (ROC), area under the ROC curve (AUC), the root mean square error (RMSE), and several other performance metrics. For the training dataset, the results show that the SVM-Dagging model acquire the largest AUC value (0.953), lowest RMSE (0.3125), highest positive predictive value (96.0%), highest negative predictive value (91.2%), highest sensitivity (91.6%), highest specificity (95.8%), highest accuracy (93.6%), and highest Kappa (0.873). Similar results are observed in the validation dataset. Results demonstrated that the Dagging technique has improved significantly the prediction ability of SVM and ADTree models. The Dagging method can combine different models by leveraging the strengths of each model to create methods with higher flexibility than traditional machine learning methods. Therefore, in this study, the proposed new models can be applied for land-use planning and management of landslide susceptibility in the study area and in other areas containing similar geological conditions.