A comparative analysis of weight-based machine learning methods for landslide susceptibility mapping in Ha Giang area

Landslide susceptibility maps (LSMs) are very crucial for planning policies in hazardous areas. However, the accuracy and reliability of LSMs depend on available data and the selection of suitable methods. This study is conducted to produce LSMs by combinations of machine learning methods and weighting techniques for Ha Giang province, Vietnam, where has limited data. In study area, we gather 11 landslide conditioning factors and establish a landslide inventory map. Computing the weights of classes (or factors) is very important to prepare data for machine learning methods to generate LSMs. We first use frequency ratio (FR) and analytic hierarchy process (AHP) techniques to generate the weights. Then, random forest (RF), support vector machine (SVM), logistic regression (LR), and AHP methods are combined with FR and AHP weights to yield accurate and reliable LSMs. Finally, the performance of these methods is evaluated by five statistical metrics, ROC and R-index. The empirical results have shown that RF is the best method in terms of R-index and the five metrics, i.e. TP rate (0.9661), FP rate (0.0), ACC (0.9835), MAE (0.0046), and RMSE (0.0350) for this study area. This study opens the perspective of weight-based machine learning methods for landslide susceptibility mapping.