This study presents three new hybrid artificial intelligence optimization models—namely, adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) with cultural (ANFIS-CA), bees (ANFIS-BA), and invasive weed optimization (ANFIS-IWO) algorithms—for flood susceptibility mapping (FSM) in the Haraz watershed, Iran. Ten continuous and categorical flood conditioning factors were chosen based on the 201 flood locations, including topographic wetness index (TWI), river density, stream power index (SPI), curvature, distance from river, lithology, elevation, ground slope, land use, and rainfall. The step-wise weight assessment ratio analysis (SWARA) model was adopted for the assessment of relationship between flood locations and conditioning factors. The ANFIS model, based on SWARA weights, was employed for providing FSMs with three optimization models to enhance the accuracy of prediction. To evaluate the model performance and prediction capability, root-mean-square error (RMSE) and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (area under the ROC (AUROC)) were used. Results showed that ANFIS-IWO with lower RMSE (0.359) had a better performance, while ANFIS-BA with higher AUROC (94.4%) showed a better prediction capability, followed by ANFIS0-IWO (0.939) and ANFIS-CA (0.921). These models can be suggested for FSM in similar climatic and physiographic areas for developing measures to mitigate flood damages and to sustainably manage floodplains.

Floods are considered one of the most disastrous hazards all over the world and cause serious casualties and property damage. Therefore, the assessment and regionalization of flood disasters are becoming increasingly important and urgent. To predict the probability of a flood, an essential step is to map flood susceptibility. The main objective of this work is to investigate the use a novel hybrid technique by integrating multi-criteria decision analysis and geographic information system to evaluate flood susceptibility mapping (FSM), which is constructed by ensemble of decision making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL), analytic network process, weighted linear combinations (WLC) and interval rough numbers (IRN) techniques in the case study at Shangyou County, China. Specifically, we improve the DEMATEL method by applying IRN to determine connections in the network structure based on criteria and to accept imprecisions during collective decision making. The application of IRN can eliminate the necessity of additional information to define uncertain number intervals. Therefore, the quality of the existing data during collective decision making and experts’ perceptions that are expressed through an aggregation matrix can be retained. In this work, eleven conditioning factors associated with flooding were considered and historical flood locations were randomly divided into the training (70% of the total) and validation (30%) sets. The flood susceptibility map validates a satisfactory consistency between the flood-susceptible areas and the spatial distribution of the previous flood events. The accuracy of the map was evaluated by using objective measures of receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve and area under the curve (AUC). The AUC values of the proposed method coupling with the WLC fuzzy technique for aggregation and flood susceptibility index are 0.988 and 0.964, respectively, which proves that the WLC fuzzy method is more effective for FSM in the study area. The proposed method can be helpful in predicting accurate flood occurrence locations with similar geographic environments and can be effectively used for flood management and prevention.

The most dangerous landslide disasters always cause serious economic losses and human deaths. The contribution of this work is to present an integrated landslide modelling framework, in which an adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) is combined with the two optimization algorithms of whale optimization algorithm (WOA) and grey wolf optimizer (GWO) at Anyuan County, China. It means that WOA and GWO are used as two meta-heuristic algorithms to improve the prediction performance of the ANFIS-based methods. In addition, the step-wise weight assessment ratio analysis (SWARA) method is used to obtain the initial weight of each class of landslide influencing factors. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, 315 landslide events in history were selected for our experiments and were randomly divided into the training and verification sets. To perform landslide susceptibility mapping, fifteen geological, hydrological, geomorphological, land cover, and other factors are considered for the modelling construction. The landslide susceptibility maps by SWARA, SWARA-ANFIS, SWARA-ANFIS-PSO, SWARA-ANFIS-WOA, and SWARA-ANFIS-GWO models are assessed using the measures of the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve and root-mean-square error (RMSE). The experiments demonstrated that the obtained results of modelling process from the SWARA to the SAWRA-ANFIS-GWO model were more accurate and that the proposed methods have satisfactory prediction ability. Specifically, prediction accuracy by area under the curve (AUC) of SWARA, SWARA-ANFIS, SWARA-ANFIS-PSO, SWARA-ANFIS-GWO, and SWARA-ANFIS-WOA models were 0.831, 0.831, 0.850, 0.856, and 0.869, respectively. Due to adaptability and usability, the proposed prediction methods can be applied to other areas for landslide management and mitigation as well as prevention throughout the world.

Landslides are a major geological hazard worldwide. Landslide susceptibility assessments are useful to mitigate human casualties, loss of property, and damage to natural resources, ecosystems, and infrastructures. This study aims to evaluate landslide susceptibility using a novel hybrid intelligence approach with the rotation forest-based credal decision tree (RF-CDT) classifier. First, 152 landslide locations and 15 landslide conditioning factors were collected from the study area. Then, these conditioning factors were assigned values using an entropy method and subsequently optimized using correlation attribute evaluation (CAE). Finally, the performance of the proposed hybrid model was validated using the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve and compared with two well-known ensemble models, bagging (bag-CDT) and MultiBoostAB (MB-CDT). Results show that the proposed RF-CDT model had better performance than the single CDT model and hybrid bag-CDT and MB-CDT models. The findings in the present study overall confirm that a combination of the meta model with a decision tree classifier could enhance the prediction power of the single landslide model. The resulting susceptibility maps could be effective for enforcement of land management regulations to reduce landslide hazards in the study area and other similar areas in the world.