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.

Geological complexities along mountain highways frequently trigger landslides, posing significant threats to transportation safety and infrastructure. This study evaluates landslide susceptibility along the Lizha-Jiezi section of China’s G345 national highway using Random Forest (RF) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) models. Eleven conditioning factors including altitude, slope, aspect, plan curvature, profile curvature, lithology, distance to fault, rainfall, distance to river, normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), and distance to road were analyzed using remote sensing and field surveys. A landslide inventory of 67 events was divided into training (70%) and validation (30%) datasets, with non-landslide samples selected at least 100 m away from landslide locations to minimize spatial overlap. Factor contribution analysis identified distance to road as the most significant predictor, highlighting anthropogenic impacts on slope destabilization. Model validation via receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves demonstrated RF’s superior performance (AUC = 0.887) over SVM (AUC = 0.735). The RF-derived susceptibility map classified five risk levels, revealing high-risk zones concentrated within 200 m of roads, consistent with field observations. Results emphasize the necessity of integrating anthropogenic factors into landslide risk management for mountainous infrastructure. This study provides actionable insights for mitigation strategies and land-use planning, offering a scalable framework adaptable to similar regions.