Uncertainties of landslide susceptibility prediction:influences of different study area scales and mapping unit scales

This study aims to investigate the effects of different mapping unit scales and study area scales on the uncertainty rules of landslide susceptibility prediction(LSP).To illustrate various study area scales,Ganzhou City in China,its eastern region(Ganzhou East),and Ruijin County in Ganzhou East were chosen.Different mapping unit scales are represented by grid units with spatial resolution of 30 and 60 m,as well as slope units that were extracted by multi-scale segmentation method.The 3855 landslide locations and 21 typical environmental factors in Ganzhou City are first determined to create spatial datasets with input-outputs.Then,landslide susceptibility maps(LSMs)of Ganzhou City,Ganzhou East and Ruijin County are pro-duced using a support vector machine(SVM)and random forest(RF),respectively.The LSMs of the above three regions are then extracted by mask from the LSM of Ganzhou City,along with the LSMs of Ruijin County from Ganzhou East.Additionally,LSMs of Ruijin at various mapping unit scales are generated in accordance.Accuracy and landslide suscepti-bility indexes(LSIs)distribution are used to express LSP uncertainties.The LSP uncertainties under grid units significantly decrease as study area scales decrease from Ganzhou City,Ganzhou East to Ruijin County,whereas those under slope units are less affected by study area scales.Of course,attentions should also be paid to the broader representativeness of large study areas.The LSP accuracy of slope units increases by about 6%–10%compared with those under grid units with 30 m and 60 m resolution in the same study area's scale.The significance of environmental factors exhibits an averaging trend as study area scale increases from small to large.The importance of environmental factors varies greatly with the 60 m grid unit,but it tends to be consistent to some extent in the 30 m grid unit and the slope unit.

Uncertainties of landslide susceptibility prediction: Influences of random errors in landslide conditioning factors and errors reduction by low pass filter method

In the existing landslide susceptibility prediction(LSP)models,the influences of random errors in landslide conditioning factors on LSP are not considered,instead the original conditioning factors are directly taken as the model inputs,which brings uncertainties to LSP results.This study aims to reveal the influence rules of the different proportional random errors in conditioning factors on the LSP un-certainties,and further explore a method which can effectively reduce the random errors in conditioning factors.The original conditioning factors are firstly used to construct original factors-based LSP models,and then different random errors of 5%,10%,15% and 20%are added to these original factors for con-structing relevant errors-based LSP models.Secondly,low-pass filter-based LSP models are constructed by eliminating the random errors using low-pass filter method.Thirdly,the Ruijin County of China with 370 landslides and 16 conditioning factors are used as study case.Three typical machine learning models,i.e.multilayer perceptron(MLP),support vector machine(SVM)and random forest(RF),are selected as LSP models.Finally,the LSP uncertainties are discussed and results show that:(1)The low-pass filter can effectively reduce the random errors in conditioning factors to decrease the LSP uncertainties.(2)With the proportions of random errors increasing from 5%to 20%,the LSP uncertainty increases continuously.(3)The original factors-based models are feasible for LSP in the absence of more accurate conditioning factors.(4)The influence degrees of two uncertainty issues,machine learning models and different proportions of random errors,on the LSP modeling are large and basically the same.(5)The Shapley values effectively explain the internal mechanism of machine learning model predicting landslide sus-ceptibility.In conclusion,greater proportion of random errors in conditioning factors results in higher LSP uncertainty,and low-pass filter can effectively reduce these random errors.

Landslide susceptibility prediction using slope unit-based machine learning models considering the heterogeneity of conditioning factors

To perform landslide susceptibility prediction(LSP),it is important to select appropriate mapping unit and landslide-related conditioning factors.The efficient and automatic multi-scale segmentation(MSS)method proposed by the authors promotes the application of slope units.However,LSP modeling based on these slope units has not been performed.Moreover,the heterogeneity of conditioning factors in slope units is neglected,leading to incomplete input variables of LSP modeling.In this study,the slope units extracted by the MSS method are used to construct LSP modeling,and the heterogeneity of conditioning factors is represented by the internal variations of conditioning factors within slope unit using the descriptive statistics features of mean,standard deviation and range.Thus,slope units-based machine learning models considering internal variations of conditioning factors(variant slope-machine learning)are proposed.The Chongyi County is selected as the case study and is divided into 53,055 slope units.Fifteen original slope unit-based conditioning factors are expanded to 38 slope unit-based conditioning factors through considering their internal variations.Random forest(RF)and multi-layer perceptron(MLP)machine learning models are used to construct variant Slope-RF and Slope-MLP models.Meanwhile,the Slope-RF and Slope-MLP models without considering the internal variations of conditioning factors,and conventional grid units-based machine learning(Grid-RF and MLP)models are built for comparisons through the LSP performance assessments.Results show that the variant Slopemachine learning models have higher LSP performances than Slope-machine learning models;LSP results of variant Slope-machine learning models have stronger directivity and practical application than Grid-machine learning models.It is concluded that slope units extracted by MSS method can be appropriate for LSP modeling,and the heterogeneity of conditioning factors within slope units can more comprehensively reflect the relationships between conditioning factors and landslides.The research results have important reference significance for land use and landslide prevention.

A novel CGBoost deep learning algorithm for coseismic landslide susceptibility prediction

The accurate prediction of landslide susceptibility shortly after a violent earthquake is quite vital to the emergency rescue in the 72-h‘‘golden window”.However,the limited quantity of interpreted landslides shortly after a massive earthquake makes landslide susceptibility prediction become a challenge.To address this gap,this work suggests an integrated method of Crossing Graph attention network and xgBoost(CGBoost).This method contains three branches,which extract the interrelations among pixels within a slope unit,the interrelations among various slope units,and the relevance between influencing factors and landslide probability,respectively,and obtain rich and discriminative features by an adaptive fusion mechanism.Thus,the difficulty of susceptibility modeling under a small number of coseismic landslides can be reduced.As a basic module of CGBoost,the proposed Crossing graph attention network(Crossgat)could characterize the spatial heterogeneity within and among slope units to reduce the false alarm in the susceptibility results.Moreover,the rainfall dynamic factors are utilized as prediction indices to improve the susceptibility performance,and the prediction index set is established by terrain,geology,human activity,environment,meteorology,and earthquake factors.CGBoost is applied to predict landslide susceptibility in the Gorkha meizoseismal area.3.43%of coseismic landslides are randomly selected,of which 70%are used for training,and the others for testing.In the testing set,the values of Overall Accuracy,Precision,Recall,F1-score,and Kappa coefficient of CGBoost attain 0.9800,0.9577,0.9999,0.9784,and 0.9598,respectively.Validated by all the coseismic landslides,CGBoost outperforms the current major landslide susceptibility assessment methods.The suggested CGBoost can be also applied to landslide susceptibility prediction in new earthquakes in the future.

Uncertainties in landslide susceptibility prediction:Influence rule of different levels of errors in landslide spatial position

The accuracy of landslide susceptibility prediction(LSP)mainly depends on the precision of the landslide spatial position.However,the spatial position error of landslide survey is inevitable,resulting in considerable uncertainties in LSP modeling.To overcome this drawback,this study explores the influence of positional errors of landslide spatial position on LSP uncertainties,and then innovatively proposes a semi-supervised machine learning model to reduce the landslide spatial position error.This paper collected 16 environmental factors and 337 landslides with accurate spatial positions taking Shangyou County of China as an example.The 30e110 m error-based multilayer perceptron(MLP)and random forest(RF)models for LSP are established by randomly offsetting the original landslide by 30,50,70,90 and 110 m.The LSP uncertainties are analyzed by the LSP accuracy and distribution characteristics.Finally,a semi-supervised model is proposed to relieve the LSP uncertainties.Results show that:(1)The LSP accuracies of error-based RF/MLP models decrease with the increase of landslide position errors,and are lower than those of original data-based models;(2)70 m error-based models can still reflect the overall distribution characteristics of landslide susceptibility indices,thus original landslides with certain position errors are acceptable for LSP;(3)Semi-supervised machine learning model can efficiently reduce the landslide position errors and thus improve the LSP accuracies.

Uncertainties of landslide susceptibility prediction:Influences of different spatial resolutions,machine learning models and proportions of training and testing dataset

This study aims to reveal the impacts of three important uncertainty issues in landslide susceptibility prediction(LSP),namely the spatial resolution,proportion of model training and testing datasets and selection of machine learning models.Taking Yanchang County of China as example,the landslide inventory and 12 important conditioning factors were acquired.The frequency ratios of each conditioning factor were calculated under five spatial resolutions(15,30,60,90 and 120 m).Landslide and non-landslide samples obtained under each spatial resolution were further divided into five proportions of training and testing datasets(9:1,8:2,7:3,6:4 and 5:5),and four typical machine learning models were applied for LSP modelling.The results demonstrated that different spatial resolution and training and testing dataset proportions induce basically similar influences on the modeling uncertainty.With a decrease in the spatial resolution from 15 m to 120 m and a change in the proportions of the training and testing datasets from 9:1 to 5:5,the modelling accuracy gradually decreased,while the mean values of predicted landslide susceptibility indexes increased and their standard deviations decreased.The sensitivities of the three uncertainty issues to LSP modeling were,in order,the spatial resolution,the choice of machine learning model and the proportions of training/testing datasets.