LAND SUBSIDENCE SUSCEPTIBILITY MAPPING USING MACHINE LEARNING ALGORITHMS

Abstract. Land subsidence (LS) is one of the most challenging natural disasters that has potential consequences such as damage to infrastructures and buildings, creating sinkholes, and leading to soil destruction. To mitigate the damages caused by LS, it is necessary to determine the LS-prone areas. In this paper, LS susceptibility was assessed for Kashan Plain in Iran using Random Forest (RF) and XGBoost machine learning algorithms. For the susceptibility analysis, twelve influential factors including elevation, slope, aspect, curvature, topographic wetness index (TWI), groundwater drawdown (GWD), normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), distance to stream (DtS), distance to road (DtR), distance to fault (DtF), lithology, and land use were taken into account. 291 LS points were used in this study which was divided into two parts of 70% and 30% for training and testing the models, respectively. The prediction power of the models and their produced LS susceptibility maps (LSSMs) were validated using the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), R-Squared (R²), and Mean Absolute Error (MAE) values. The results showed that the XGBoost had a higher R² equal to 0.9032 compared to that of the RF which was equal to 0.8355. XGBoost model had an RMSE equal to 0.3764 cm compared to that of the RF model which was equal to 0.4906 cm. MAE for the XGBoost model was 0.1217 cm and for the RF model was 0.3050 cm. Therefore, the achieved results proved that XGBoost had better performance in this research for predicting LS values based on the measured ones.