AN EVALUATION OF LANDSLIDE SUSCEPTIBILITY MAPPING USING REMOTE SENSING DATA AND MACHINE LEARNING ALGORITHMS IN IRAN

Abstract. Landslide is painstaking as one of the most prevalent and devastating forms of mass movement that affects man and his environment. The specific objective of this research paper is to investigate the application and performances of some selected machine learning algorithms (MLA) in landslide susceptibility mapping, in Dodangeh watershed, Iran. A 112 sample point of the past landslide, occurrence or inventory data was generated from the existing and field observations. In addition, fourteen landslide-conditioning parameters were derived from DEM and other topographic databases for the modelling process. These conditioning parameters include total curvature, profile curvature, plan curvature, slope, aspect, altitude, topographic wetness index (TWI), topographic roughness index (TRI), stream transport index (STI), stream power index (SPI), lithology, land use, distance to stream, distance to the fault. Meanwhile, factor analysis was employed to optimize the landslide conditioning parameters and the inventory data, by assessing the multi-collinearity effects and outlier detections respectively. The inventory data is divided into 70% (78) training dataset and 30% (34) test dataset for model validation. The receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve or area under curve (AUC) value was used for assessing the model's performance. The findings reveal that TRI has 0.89 collinearity effect based on variance-inflated factor (VIF) and based on Gini factor optimization total curvature is not significant in the model development, therefore the two parameters are excluded from the modelling. All the selected MLAs (RF, BRT, and DT) shown promising performances on landslide susceptibility mapping in Dodangeh watershed, Iran. The ROC curve for training and validation for RF are 86% success rate and 83% prediction rate implies the best model performance compared to BRT and DT, with ROC curve of 72% and 70% prediction rate, respectively. In conclusion, RF could be the best algorithm for producing landslide susceptibility map, and such results could be adopted for the decision-making process to support land use planner for improving landslide risk assessment in similar environmental settings.