Hybrids of Support Vector Regression with Grey Wolf Optimizer and Firefly Algorithm for Spatial Prediction of Landslide Susceptibility

Landslides are one of the most frequent and important natural disasters in the world. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the landslide susceptibility in Zhenping County using a hybrid of support vector regression (SVR) with grey wolf optimizer (GWO) and firefly algorithm (FA) by frequency ratio (FR) preprocessed. Therefore, a landslide inventory composed of 140 landslides and 16 landslide conditioning factors is compiled as a landslide database. Among these landslides, 70% (98) landslides were randomly selected as the training dataset of the model, and the other landslides (42) were used to verify the model. The 16 landslide conditioning factors include elevation, slope, aspect, plan curvature, profile curvature, distance to faults, distance to rivers, distance to roads, sediment transport index (STI), stream power index (SPI), topographic wetness index (TWI), normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), landslide, rainfall, soil and lithology. The conditioning factors selection and spatial correlation analysis were carried out by using the correlation attribute evaluation (CAE) method and the frequency ratio (FR) algorithm. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) and kappa data of the training dataset and validation dataset are used to evaluate the prediction ability and the relationship between the advantages and disadvantages of landslide susceptibility maps. The results show that the SVR-GWO model (AUROC = 0.854) has the best performance in landslide spatial prediction, followed by the SVR-FA (AUROC = 0.838) and SVR models (AUROC = 0.818). The hybrid models of SVR-GWO and SVR-FA improve the performance of the single SVR model, and all three models have good prospects for regional-scale landslide spatial modeling.