The early identification of potential landslide hazards is of great practical significance for disaster early warning and prevention. The study used different machine learning methods to identify potential active landslides along a 15 km buffer zone on both sides of Jinsha River (Panzhihua-Huize section), China. The morphology and texture features of landslides were characterized with InSAR deformation monitoring data and high-resolution optical remote sensing data, combined with 17 landslide influencing factors. In the study area, 83 deformation accumulation areas of potential landslide hazards and 54 deformation accumulation areas of non-potential landslide hazards were identified through spatial overlay analysis with 64 potential active landslides, which have been confirmed by field verification. The Naive Bayes (NB), Decision Tree (DT), Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Random Forest (RF) algorithms were trained and tested through attribute selection and parameter optimization. Among the 17 landslide influencing factors, Drainage Density, NDVI, Slope and Weathering Degree play an indispensable role in the machine learning and recognition of landslide hazards in our study area, while other influencing factors play a certain role in different algorithms. A multi-index (Precision, Recall, F1) comparison shows that the SVM (0.867, 0.829, 0.816) has better recognition precision skill for small-scale unbalanced landslide deformation datasets, followed by RF (0.765, 0.756, 0.741), DT (0.755, 0.756, 0.748) and NB (0.659, 0.659, 0.659). Different from the previous study on landslide susceptibility and hazard mapping based on machine learning, this study focuses on how to find out the potential active landslide points more accurately, rather than evaluating the landslide susceptibility of specific areas to tell us which areas are more sensitive to landslides. This study verified the feasibility of early identification of landslide hazards by using different machine learning methods combined with deformation information and multi-source landslide influencing factors rather than by relying on human–computer interaction. This study shows that the efficiency of potential hazard identification can be increased while reducing the subjective bias caused by relying only on human experts.

Geological hazard risk assessment provides essential scientific support for geological disaster prevention and governance. The selection of appropriate evaluation factors is crucial to the accuracy and practicality of the risk assessment results. The existing factors for geological hazard risk assessment often suffer from issues such as poor timeliness and insufficient completeness. Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) technology, which offers large-scale, high spatiotemporal resolution monitoring of surface deformation, can effectively compensate for the shortcomings of existing risk assessment factors. How to effectively integrate time-series InSAR deformation results into geological hazard risk assessment has become a focus of research. This study fully considers the time-series InSAR deformation information; both the ascending and descending orbit results of the time-series InSAR deformation are introduced as two categories of evaluation factors in the risk assessment model. Subsequently, 11 types of assessment factors are selected by the Pearson correlation coefficient method, while the Information Volume Model and Evidence Weight Model are applied in the partitioning and assessment of risks in Xiaojin County, China. Finally, ROC (Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve) analysis is utilized to compare the accuracy of model evaluations before and after incorporating time-series InSAR deformation results. The results indicate that: (1) after incorporating time-series InSAR deformation monitoring results as evaluation factors into the information volume model and evidence weight model, the evaluation accuracy of the two models improved by 9.69% and 11.26%, respectively; (2) there are differences in risk partitioning among different evaluation models. From the risk partitioning result of Xiaojin County in this study, the evaluation accuracy of the information volume model is higher than that of the evidence weight model, and the performance is more prominent after adding the time-series InSAR deformation results.