Landslide susceptibility assessment and factor effect analysis: backpropagation artificial neural networks and their comparison with frequency ratio and bivariate logistic regression modelling

• Authors: Biswajeet Pradhan;Saro Lee
• Venue: Environmental Modelling & Software
• Year: 2010

Data collection for landslide susceptibility modeling is often an inhibitive activity. This is one reason why for quite some time landslides have been described and modelled on the basis of spatially distributed values of landslide-related attributes. This paper presents landslide susceptibility analysis in the Klang Valley area, Malaysia, using back-propagation artificial neural network model. A landslide inventory map with a total of 398 landslide locations was constructed using the data from various sources. Out of 398 landslide locations, 318 (80%) of the data taken before the year 2004 was used for training the neural network model and the remaining 80 (20%) locations (post-2004 events) were used for the accuracy assessment purpose. Topographical, geological data and satellite images were collected, processed, and constructed into a spatial database using GIS and image processing. Eleven landslide occurrence related factors were selected as: slope angle, slope aspect, curvature, altitude, distance to roads, distance to rivers, lithology, distance to faults, soil type, landcover and the normalized difference vegetation index value. For calculating the weight of the relative importance of each factor to the landslide occurrence, an artificial neural network method was developed. Each thematic layer's weight was determined by the back-propagation training method and landslide susceptibility indices (LSI) were calculated using the trained back-propagation weights. To assess the factor effects, the weights were calculated three times, using all 11 factors in the first case, then recalculating after removal of those 4 factors that had the smallest weights, and thirdly after removal of the remaining 3 least influential factors. The effect of weights in landslide susceptibility was verified using the landslide location data. It is revealed that all factors have relatively positive effects on the landslide susceptibility maps in the study. The validation results showed sufficient agreement between the computed susceptibility maps and the existing data on landslide areas. The distribution of landslide susceptibility zones derived from ANN shows similar trends as those obtained by applying in GIS-based susceptibility procedures by the same authors (using the frequency ratio and logistic regression method) and indicates that ANN results are better than the earlier method. Among the three cases, the best accuracy (94%) was obtained in the case of the 7 factors weight, whereas 11 factors based weight showed the worst accuracy (91%).