Landslides cause a considerable amount of damage around the world every year. Landslide susceptibility assessments are useful for the mitigation of the associated potential risks to local economic development, land use planning, and decision makers. The main aim of this study was to present a novel hybrid approach of bagging (B)-based kernel logistic regression (KLR), named the BKLR model, for spatial prediction of landslides in the Shangnan County, China. We first selected 15 conditioning factors for landslide susceptibility modeling. Then, the prediction capability of all conditioning factors was evaluated using the least square support vector machine method. Model validation and comparison were performed based on the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve and several statistical-based indexes, including positive predictive rate, negative predictive rate, sensitivity, specificity, kappa index, and root mean square error. Results indicated that the BKLR ensemble model outperformed and outclassed the KLR and the benchmark support vector machine model. Our findings overall confirmed that a combination of the meta model with a decision tree classifier based on a functional algorithm can decrease the over-fitting and variance problems of data, which could enhance the prediction power of the landslide model. The resultant susceptibility maps could be useful for hazard mitigation in the study area and other similar landslide-prone areas.

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.

The main purpose of this study is to apply three bivariate statistical models, namely weight of evidence (WoE), evidence belief function (EBF) and index of entropy (IoE), and their ensembles with logistic regression (LR) for landslide susceptibility mapping in Muchuan County, China. First, a landslide inventory map contained 279 landslides was obtained through the field investigation and interpretation of aerial photographs. Next, the landslides were randomly divided into two parts for training and validation with the ratio of 70/30. In addition, according to the regional geological environment characteristics, twelve landslide conditioning factors were selected, including altitude, plan curvature, profile curvature, slope angle, distance to roads, distance to rivers, topographic wetness index (TWI), normalized different vegetation index (NDVI), land use, soil, and lithology. Subsequently, the landslide susceptibility mapping was carried out by the above models. Eventually, the accuracy of this research was validated by the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve and the results indicated that the landslide susceptibility map produced by EBF-LR model has the highest accuracy (0.826), followed by IoE-LR model (0.825), WoE-LR model (0.792), EBF model (0.791), IoE model (0.778), and WoE model (0.753). The results of this study can provide references of landslide prevention and land use planning for local government.