Landslide susceptibility mapping in Three Gorges Reservoir area based on GIS and boosting decision tree model

As one of the most destructive geological disasters, a myriad of landslides has revived and developed in the Three Gorges Reservoir area under the combined action of various detrimental factors. Therefore, the pertinently regional landslide susceptibility mapping (LSM) is of great significance for disaster prevention and mitigation. In this study, LSM is prepared by using a boosting-C5.0 decision tree model. Under the landslide verification of on-site investigations, the study area is divided into accumulation and rock areas, and a total of 12 impact factors are selected. TOL and VIF are employed to determine the multicollinearity among the impact factors. The independent training (80%) and validation (20%) datasets are constructed by random sampling for LSM. ANN, C5.0, and SVM are selected for comparative analysis. The results show that there is no rigorous multicollinearity among the impact factors proposed in this paper. The landslide susceptibility in the study area is divided into low, moderate, high, and very high. The highest susceptibility area distributes along the riverside where the landslide ratio is 37.05% in boosting-C5.0 model. Then the ROCs are expropriated to infer the accuracy of each model. The boosting-C5.0 performs the best with the largest area under the curve in both accumulation and rock areas, reaching at 0.991 and 0.990 in the validation sets, respectively. Finally, the composite modification of the 5 validation sets shows that the uncertainty of boosting-C5.0 is concentrated in the intermediate probability areas of susceptibility. This study reveals the feasibility of machine learning in landslide susceptibility assessment, which could provide a basis for the risk management and control of geological disasters.