Time series prediction of reservoir bank landslide failure probability considering the spatial variability of soil properties

Abstract

Historically, landslides have been the primary type of geological disaster worldwide. Generally, the stability of reservoir banks is primarily affected by rainfall and reservoir water level fluctuations. Moreover, the stability of reservoir banks changes with the long-term dynamics of external disaster-causing factors. Thus, assessing the time-varying reliability of reservoir landslides remains a challenge. In this paper, a machine learning (ML) based approach is proposed to analyze the long-term reliability of reservoir bank landslides in spatially variable soils through time series prediction. This study systematically investigated the prediction performances of three ML algorithms, i.e. multilayer perceptron (MLP), convolutional neural network (CNN), and long short-term memory (LSTM). Additionally, the effects of the data quantity and data ratio on the predictive power of deep learning models are considered. The results show that all three ML models can accurately depict the changes in the time-varying failure probability of reservoir landslides. The CNN model outperforms both the MLP and LSTM models in predicting the failure probability. Furthermore, selecting the right data ratio can improve the prediction accuracy of the failure probability obtained by ML models.