Exploring advanced machine learning techniques for landslide susceptibility mapping in Yanchuan County, China

Many landslides occurred every year, causing extensive property losses and casualties in China. Landslide susceptibility mapping is crucial for disaster prevention by the government or related organizations to protect people's lives and property. This study compared the performance of random forest (RF), classification and regression trees (CART), Bayesian network (BN), and logistic model trees (LMT) methods in generating landslide susceptibility maps in Yanchuan County using optimization strategy. A field survey was conducted to map 311 landslides. The dataset was divided into a training dataset and a validation dataset with a ratio of 7:3. Sixteen factors influencing landslides were identified based on a geological survey of the study area, including elevation, plan curvature, profile curvature, slope aspect, slope angle, slope length, topographic position index (TPI), terrain ruggedness index (TRI), convergence index, normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), distance to roads, distance to rivers, rainfall, soil type, lithology, and land use. The training dataset was used to train the models in Weka software, and landslide susceptibility maps were generated in GIS software. The performance of the four models was evaluated by receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves, confusion matrix, chi-square test, and other statistical analysis methods. The comparison results show that all four machine learning models are suitable for evaluating landslide susceptibility in the study area. The performances of the RF and LMT methods are more stable than those of the other two models; thus, they are suitable for landslide susceptibility mapping.