Assessment of Landslide Susceptibility in the Intermontane Basin Area of Northern Thailand

Abstract

In mountainous terrain, landslides are common, particularly in intermontane basin locations. Such regions can adversely affect both human beings and the environment. In the assessment of landslide susceptibility, machine learning (ML) algorithms are increasingly popular due to their compatibility with geospatial data and tools. Herein, this study evaluated the performance of four ML algorithms: namely, random forest (RF), gradient boost (GB), extreme gradient boost (XGB), and stacking ensemble (STK). These algorithms were implemented to create a practical model of landslide susceptibility. The site under investigation is in the province of Chiang Mai, an intermontane basin area in northern Thailand where populations are settled. To address issues of multicollinearity, the variance inflation factor (VIF) was used. Eight out of fourteen factors were selected for examination; hyperparameters of each model were tested to acquire the best combination. Results indicated that the STK model outperforms all other models, providing evaluation metrics (precision, recall, F1-score, and overall accuracy) of 82.92%, 81.18%, 82.04%, and 81.75%, respectively. The area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve also reveals the high efficiency of the model, achieving 0.8928. However, further analysis of the appropriate model or base learner is necessary for achieving even higher predictive results.