Landslide susceptibility assessment based on different machine-learning methods in Zhaoping County of eastern Guangxi

Abstract. Regarding the ever increasing and frequent occurrence of serious landslide disaster in eastern Guangxi, the current study were implemented to adopt support vector machines (SVM), particle swarm optimization support vector machines (PSO-SVM), random forest (RF), and particle swarm optimization random forest (PSO-RF) methods to assess landslide susceptibility by Zhaoping County. To this end, 10 landslide disaster-related causal variables including digital elevation model (DEM)-derived, meteorology-derived, Landsat8-derived, geology-derived, and human activities factors were selected for running four machine-learning (ML) methods, and landslide susceptibility evaluation maps were produced. Then, receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curves, and field investigation were performed to verify the efficiency of these models. Analysis and comparison of the results denoted that all four ML models performed well for the landslide susceptibility evaluation as indicated by the values of ROC curves – from 0.863 to 0.934. Moreover, the results also indicated that the PSO algorithm has a good effect on SVM and FR models. In addition, such a result also revealed that the PSO-RF and PSO-SVM models have the strong robustness and stable performance, and those two models are promising methods that could be transferred to other regions for landslide susceptibility evaluation.