In the present study, gully erosion susceptibility was evaluated for the area of the Robat Turk Watershed in Iran. The assessment of gully erosion susceptibility was performed using four state-of-the-art data mining techniques: random forest (RF), credal decision trees (CDTree), kernel logistic regression (KLR), and best-first decision tree (BFTree). To the best of our knowledge, the KLR and CDTree algorithms have been rarely applied to gully erosion modeling. In the first step, from the 242 gully erosion locations that were identified, 70% (170 gullies) were selected as the training dataset, and the other 30% (72 gullies) were considered for the result validation process. In the next step, twelve gully erosion conditioning factors, including topographic, geomorphological, environmental, and hydrologic factors, were selected to estimate gully erosion susceptibility. The area under the ROC curve (AUC) was used to estimate the performance of the models. The results revealed that the RF model had the best performance (AUC = 0.893), followed by the KLR (AUC = 0.825), the CDTree (AUC = 0.808), and the BFTree (AUC = 0.789) models. Overall, the RF model performed significantly better than the others, which may support the application of this method to a transferable susceptibility model in other areas. Therefore, we suggest using the RF, KLR, and CDT models for gully erosion susceptibility mapping in other prone areas to assess their reproducibility.

In this study, hybrid integration of MultiBoosting based on two artificial intelligence methods (the radial basis function network (RBFN) and credal decision tree (CDT) models) and geographic information systems (GIS) were used to establish landslide susceptibility maps, which were used to evaluate landslide susceptibility in Nanchuan County, China. First, the landslide inventory map was generated based on previous research results combined with GIS and aerial photos. Then, 298 landslides were identified, and the established dataset was divided into a training dataset (70%, 209 landslides) and a validation dataset (30%, 89 landslides) with ensured randomness, fairness, and symmetry of data segmentation. Sixteen landslide conditioning factors (altitude, profile curvature, plan curvature, slope aspect, slope angle, stream power index (SPI), topographical wetness index (TWI), sediment transport index (STI), distance to rivers, distance to roads, distance to faults, rainfall, NDVI, soil, land use, and lithology) were identified in the study area. Subsequently, the CDT, RBFN, and their ensembles with MultiBoosting (MCDT and MRBFN) were used in ArcGIS to generate the landslide susceptibility maps. The performances of the four landslide susceptibility maps were compared and verified based on the area under the curve (AUC). Finally, the verification results of the AUC evaluation show that the landslide susceptibility mapping generated by the MCDT model had the best performance.

The main purpose of this study was to apply the novel bivariate weights-of-evidence-based SysFor (SF) for landslide susceptibility mapping, and two machine learning techniques, namely the naïve Bayes (NB) and Radial basis function networks (RBFNetwork), as benchmark models. Firstly, by using aerial photos and geological field surveys, the 263 landslide locations in the study area were obtained. Next, the identified landslides were randomly classified according to the ratio of 70/30 to construct training data and validation models, respectively. Secondly, based on the landslide inventory map, combined with the geological and geomorphological characteristics of the study area, 14 affecting factors of the landslide were determined. The predictive ability of the selected factors was evaluated using the LSVM model. Using the WoE model, the relationship between landslides and affecting factors was analyzed by positive and negative correlation methods. The above three hybrid models were then used to map landslide susceptibility. Thirdly, the ROC curve and various statistical data (SE, 95% CI and MAE) were used to verify and compare the predictive power of the model. Compared with the other two models, the Sysfor model had a larger area under the curve (AUC) of 0.876 (training dataset) and 0.783 (validation dataset). Finally, by quantitatively comparing the susceptibility values of each pixel, the differences in spatial morphology of landslide susceptibility maps were compared, and the model was found to have limitations and effectiveness. The landslide susceptibility maps obtained by the three models are reasonable, and the landslide susceptibility maps generated by the SysFor model have the highest comprehensive performance. The results obtained in this paper can help local governments in land use planning, disaster reduction and environmental protection.

The purpose of this study is to compare nine models, composed of certainty factors (CFs), weights of evidence (WoE), evidential belief function (EBF) and two machine learning models, namely random forest (RF) and support vector machine (SVM). In the first step, fifteen landslide conditioning factors were selected to prepare thematic maps, including slope aspect, slope angle, elevation, stream power index (SPI), sediment transport index (STI), topographic wetness index (TWI), plan curvature, profile curvature, land use, normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), soil, lithology, rainfall, distance to rivers and distance to roads. In the second step, 152 landslides were randomly divided into two groups at a ratio of 70/30 as the training and validation datasets. In the third step, the weights of the CF, WoE and EBF models for conditioning factor were calculated separately, and the weights were used to generate the landslide susceptibility maps. The weights of each bivariate model were substituted into the RF and SVM models, respectively, and six integrated models and landslide susceptibility maps were obtained. In the fourth step, the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve and related parameters were used for verification and comparison, and then the success rate curve and the prediction rate curves were used for re-analysis. The comprehensive results showed that the hybrid model is superior to the bivariate model, and all nine models have excellent performance. The WoE–RF model has the highest predictive ability (AUC_T: 0.9993, AUC_P: 0.8968). The landslide susceptibility maps produced in this study can be used to manage landslide hazard and risk in Linyou County and other similar areas.