Landslide susceptibility assessment with machine learning algorithms

Case study addresses NW slopes of Fruska Gora Mountain, Serbia. Landslide activity is quite notorious in this region, especially along the Danube's right river bank, and recently intensified seismicity coupled with atmospheric precipitation might be critical for triggering new landslide occurrences. Hence, it is not a moment too soon for serious landslide susceptibility assessment in this region. State-of-the-art approaches had been taken into consideration, cutting down to the Support Vector Machine (SVM) and k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) algorithms, trained upon expert based model of landslide susceptibility (a multi-criteria analysis). The latter involved Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) for weighting influences of different input parameters. These included elevation, slope angle, aspect, distance from flows, vegetation cover, lithology, and rainfall, to represent the natural factors of the slope stability. Processed in a GIS environment (as discrete or float raster layers) trough AHP, those parameters yielded susceptibility pattern, classified by the entropy model into four classes. Subsequently the susceptibility pattern has been featured as training set in SVM and k-NN algorithms. Detailed fitting involved several cases, among which SVM with Gaussian kernel over geo-dataset (coordinates and input parameters) reached the highest accuracy (88%) outperforming other considered cases by far.