Predicting Landslides Using Locally Aligned Convolutional Neural Networks

Landslides, movement of soil and rock under the influence of gravity, are common phenomena that cause significant human and economic losses every year. Experts use heterogeneous features such as slope, elevation, land cover, lithology, rock age, and rock family to predict landslides. To work with such features, we adapted convolutional neural networks to consider relative spatial information for the prediction task. Traditional filters in these networks either have a fixed orientation or are rotationally invariant. Intuitively, the filters should orient uphill, but there is not enough data to learn the concept of uphill; instead, it can be provided as prior knowledge. We propose a model called Locally Aligned Convolutional Neural Network, LACNN, that follows the ground surface at multiple scales to predict possible landslide occurrence for a single point. To validate our method, we created a standardized dataset of georeferenced images consisting of the heterogeneous features as inputs, and compared our method to several baselines, including linear regression, a neural network, and a convolutional network, using log-likelihood error and Receiver Operating Characteristic curves on the test set. Our model achieves 2-7% improvement in terms of accuracy and 2-15% boost in terms of log likelihood compared to the other proposed baselines.Comment: Published in IJCAI 202

A novel integrated approach of relevance vector machine optimized by imperialist competitive algorithm for spatial modeling of shallow landslides

This research aims at proposing a new artificial intelligence approach (namely RVM-ICA) which is based on the Relevance Vector Machine (RVM) and the Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA) optimization for landslide susceptibility modeling. A Geographic Information System (GIS) spatial database was generated from Lang Son city in Lang Son province (Vietnam). This GIS database includes a landslide inventory map and fourteen landslide conditioning factors. The suitability of these factors for landslide susceptibility modeling in the study area was verified by the Information Gain Ratio (IGR) technique. A landslide susceptibility prediction model based on RVM-ICA and the GIS database was established by training and prediction phases. The predictive capability of the new approach was evaluated by calculations of sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, and the area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve (AUC). In addition, to assess the applicability of the proposed model, two state-of-the-art soft computing techniques including the support vector machine (SVM) and logistic regression (LR) were used as benchmark methods. The results of this study show that RVM-ICA with AUC = 0.92 achieved a high goodness-of-fit based on both the training and testing datasets. The predictive capability of RVM-ICA outperformed those of SVM with AUC = 0.91 and LR with AUC = 0.87. The experimental results confirm that the newly proposed model is a very promising alternative to assist planners and decision makers in the task of managing landslide prone areas

Establishment of Landslide Groundwater Level Prediction Model Based on GA-SVM and Influencing Factor Analysis

The monitoring and prediction of the landslide groundwater level is a crucial part of landslide early warning systems. In this study, Tangjiao landslide in the Three Gorges Reservoir area (TGRA) in China was taken as a case study. Three groundwater level monitoring sensors were installed in different locations of the landslide. The monitoring data indicated that the fluctuation of groundwater level is significantly consistent with rainfall and reservoir level in time, but there is a lag. In addition, there is a spatial difference in the impact of reservoir levels on the landslide groundwater level. The data of two monitoring locations were selected for establishing the prediction model of groundwater. Combined with the qualitative and quantitative analysis, the influencing factors were selected, respectively, to establish the hybrid Genetic Algorithm-Support Vector Machine (GA-SVM) prediction model. The single-factor GA-SVM without considering influencing factors and the backpropagation neural network (BPNN) model were adopted to make comparisons. The results showed that the multi-factor GA-SVM performed the best, followed by multi-factor BPNN and single-factor GA-SVM. We found that the prediction accuracy can be improved by considering the influencing factor. The proposed GA-SVM model combines the advantages of each algorithm; it can effectively construct the response relationship between groundwater level fluctuations and influencing factors. Above all, the multi-factor GA-SVM is an effective method for the prediction of landslides groundwater in the TGRA

Selection of contributing factors for predicting landslide susceptibility using machine learning and deep learning models

Landslides are a common natural disaster that can cause casualties, property safety threats and economic losses. Therefore, it is important to understand or predict the probability of landslide occurrence at potentially risky sites. A commonly used means is to carry out a landslide susceptibility assessment based on a landslide inventory and a set of landslide contributing factors. This can be readily achieved using machine learning (ML) models such as logistic regression (LR), support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF), extreme gradient boosting (Xgboost), or deep learning (DL) models such as convolutional neural network (CNN) and long short time memory (LSTM). As the input data for these models, landslide contributing factors have varying influences on landslide occurrence. Therefore, it is logically feasible to select more important contributing factors and eliminate less relevant ones, with the aim of increasing the prediction accuracy of these models. However, selecting more important factors is still a challenging task and there is no generally accepted method. Furthermore, the effects of factor selection using various methods on the prediction accuracy of ML and DL models are unclear. In this study, the impact of the selection of contributing factors on the accuracy of landslide susceptibility predictions using ML and DL models was investigated. Four methods for selecting contributing factors were considered for all the aforementioned ML and DL models, which included Information Gain Ratio (IGR), Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operators (LASSO) and Harris Hawk Optimization (HHO). In addition, autoencoder-based factor selection methods for DL models were also investigated. To assess their performances, an exhaustive approach was adopted,...Comment: Stochastic Environmental Research and Risk Assessmen

Performance assessment of individual and ensemble data-mining techniques for gully erosion modeling

Gully erosion is identified as an important sediment source in a range of environments and plays a conclusive role in redistribution of eroded soils on a slope. Hence, addressing spatial occurrence pattern of this phenomenon is very important. Different ensemble models and their single counterparts, mostly data mining methods, have been used for gully erosion susceptibility mapping; however, their calibration and validation procedures need to be thoroughly addressed. The current study presents a series of individual and ensemble dataminingmethods including artificial neural network (ANN), support vector machine (SVM), maximum entropy (ME), ANN-SVM, ANN-ME, and SVM-ME to map gully erosion susceptibility in Aghemam watershed, Iran. To this aim, a gully inventory map along with sixteen gully conditioning factors was used. A 70:30% randomly partitioned sets were used to assess goodness-of-fit and prediction power of the models. The robustness, as the stability ofmodels' performance in response to changes in the dataset, was assessed through three training/test replicates. As a result, conducted preliminary statistical tests showed that ANN has the highest concordance and spatial differentiation with a chi-square value of 36,656 at 95% confidence level,while theME appeared to have the lowest concordance (1772). The ME model showed an impractical result where 45% of the study area was introduced as highly susceptible to gullying, in contrast, ANN-SVMindicated a practical resultwith focusing only on 34% of the study area. Through all three replicates, the ANN-SVM ensemble showed the highest goodness-of-fit and predictive power with a respective values of 0.897 (area under the success rate curve) and 0.879 (area under the prediction rate curve), on average, and correspondingly the highest robustness. This attests the important role of ensemble modeling in congruently building accurate and generalized models which emphasizes the necessity to examine different models integrations. The result of this study can prepare an outline for further biophysical designs on gullies scattered in the study area

Evaluation of the landslide susceptibility and its spatial difference in the whole Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau region by five learning algorithms

AbstractLandslides are considered as major natural hazards that cause enormous property damages and fatalities in Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP). In this article, we evaluated the landslide susceptibility, and its spatial differencing in the whole Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau region using five state-of-the-art learning algorithms; deep neural network (DNN), logistic regression (LR), Naïve Bayes (NB), random forest (RF), and support vector machine (SVM), differing from previous studies only in local areas of QTP. The 671 landslide events were considered, and thirteen landslide conditioning factors (LCFs) were derived for database generation, including annual rainfall, distance to drainage $${(\mathrm{Ds}}_{\mathrm{d}})$$ ( Ds d ) , distance to faults $${(\mathrm{Ds}}_{\mathrm{f}})$$ ( Ds f ) , drainage density ($${D}_{d})$$ D d ) , elevation (Elev), fault density $$({F}_{d})$$ ( F d ) , lithology, normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), plan curvature $${(\mathrm{Pl}}_{\mathrm{c}})$$ ( Pl c ) , profile curvature $${(\mathrm{Pr}}_{\mathrm{c}})$$ ( Pr c ) , slope $${(S}^{^\circ })$$ ( S ∘ ) , stream power index (SPI), and topographic wetness index (TWI). The multi-collinearity analysis and mean decrease Gini (MDG) were used to assess the suitability and predictability of these factors. Consequently, five landslide susceptibility prediction (LSP) maps were generated and validated using accuracy, area under the receiver operatic characteristic curve, sensitivity, and specificity. The MDG results demonstrated that the rainfall, elevation, and lithology were the most significant landslide conditioning factors ruling the occurrence of landslides in Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau. The LSP maps depicted that the north-northwestern and south-southeastern regions ( 45% of total area). Moreover, among the five models with a high goodness-of-fit, RF model was highlighted as the superior one, by which higher accuracy of landslide susceptibility assessment and better prone areas management in QTP can be achieved compared to previous results. Graphical Abstrac

Landslide Susceptibility Mapping Using the Stacking Ensemble Machine Learning Method in Lushui, Southwest China

Landslide susceptibility mapping is considered to be a prerequisite for landslide prevention and mitigation. However, delineating the spatial occurrence pattern of the landslide remains a challenge. This study investigates the potential application of the stacking ensemble learning technique for landslide susceptibility assessment. In particular, support vector machine (SVM), artificial neural network (ANN), logical regression (LR), and naive Bayes (NB) were selected as base learners for the stacking ensemble method. The resampling scheme and Pearson’s correlation analysis were jointly used to evaluate the importance level of these base learners. A total of 388 landslides and 12 conditioning factors in the Lushui area (Southwest China) were used as the dataset to develop landslide modeling. The landslides were randomly separated into two parts, with 70% used for model training and 30% used for model validation. The models’ performance was evaluated using the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC) and statistical measures. The results showed that the stacking-based ensemble model achieved an improved predictive accuracy as compared to the single algorithms, while the SVM-ANN-NB-LR (SANL) model, the SVM-ANN-NB (SAN) model, and the ANN-NB-LR (ANL) models performed equally well, with AUC values of 0.931, 0.940, and 0.932, respectively, for validation stage. The correlation coefficient between the LR and SVM was the highest for all resampling rounds, with a value of 0.72 on average. This connotes that LR and SVM played an almost equal role when the ensemble of SANL was applied for landslide susceptibility analysis. Therefore, it is feasible to use the SAN model or the ANL model for the study area. The finding from this study suggests that the stacking ensemble machine learning method is promising for landslide susceptibility mapping in the Lushui area and is capable of targeting areas prone to landslides

Large-Scale Landslide Susceptibility Mapping Using an Integrated Machine Learning Model: A Case Study in the Lvliang Mountains of China

Integration of different models may improve the performance of landslide susceptibility assessment, but few studies have tested it. The present study aims at exploring the way to integrating different models and comparing the results among integrated and individual models. Our objective is to answer this question: Will the integrated model have higher accuracy compared with individual model? The Lvliang mountains area, a landslide-prone area in China, was taken as the study area, and ten factors were considered in the influencing factors system. Three basic machine learning models (the back propagation (BP), support vector machine (SVM), and random forest (RF) models) were integrated by an objective function where the weight coefficients among different models were computed by the gray wolf optimization (GWO) algorithm. 80 and 20% of the landslide data were randomly selected as the training and testing samples, respectively, and different landslide susceptibility maps were generated based on the GIS platform. The results illustrated that the accuracy expressed by the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of the BP-SVM-RF integrated model was the highest (0.7898), which was better than that of the BP (0.6929), SVM (0.6582), RF (0.7258), BP-SVM (0.7360), BP-RF (0.7569), and SVM-RF models (0.7298). The experimental results authenticated the effectiveness of the BP-SVM-RF method, which can be a reliable model for the regional landslide susceptibility assessment of the study area. Moreover, the proposed procedure can be a good option to integrate different models to seek an "optimal" result. Keywords: landslide susceptibility, random forest, integrated model, causal factor, GI

Landslide Susceptibility Prediction Modeling Based on Self-Screening Deep Learning Model

Landslide susceptibility prediction has always been an important and challenging content. However, there are some uncertain problems to be solved in susceptibility modeling, such as the error of landslide samples and the complex nonlinear relationship between environmental factors. A self-screening graph convolutional network and long short-term memory network (SGCN-LSTM) is proposed int this paper to overcome the above problems in landslide susceptibility prediction. The SGCN-LSTM model has the advantages of wide width and good learning ability. The landslide samples with large errors outside the set threshold interval are eliminated by self-screening network, and the nonlinear relationship between environmental factors can be extracted from both spatial nodes and time series, so as to better simulate the nonlinear relationship between environmental factors. The SGCN-LSTM model was applied to landslide susceptibility prediction in Anyuan County, Jiangxi Province, China, and compared with Cascade-parallel Long Short-Term Memory and Conditional Random Fields (CPLSTM-CRF), Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and Logistic Regression (LR) models.The landslide prediction experiment in Anyuan County showed that the total accuracy and AUC of SGCN-LSTM model were the highest among the six models, and the total accuracy reached 92.38 %, which was 5.88%, 12.44%, 19.65%, 19.92% and 20.34% higher than those of CPLSTM-CRF, RF, SVM, SGD and LR models, respectively. The AUC value reached 0.9782, which was 0.0305,0.0532,0.1875,0.1909 and 0.1829 higher than the other five models, respectively. In conclusion, compared with some existing traditional machine learning, the SGCN-LSTM model proposed in this paper has higher landslide prediction accuracy and better robustness, and has a good application prospect in the LSP field