A landslide susceptibility assessment method based on auto-encoder improved deep belief network

The landslide susceptibility assessment is an essential part of landslide disaster risk identification and prevention. However, the binarization of the hidden layer limits the parameterization ability of the conditional probability of visible layer, making the training process of restricted Boltzmann machine more difficult and further limiting the accuracy and efficiency of deep belief network (DBN) model in landslide susceptibility assessment. Therefore, this study proposed a landslide susceptibility assessment method based on Auto-Encoder (AE)-modified DBN. Zhouqu County, Gansu Province in the People's Republic of China, was selected as the study area. Historical landslides in Zhouqu County were identified using small baseline subset interferometric synthetic aperture radar technology and optical image. Landslide factors were screened based on a geographical detector and stepwise regression method. The Logcosh loss function and determinant coefficient R (2) index were used to evaluate the training process of the AE model, and the balanced cross entropy loss function was used to evaluate the entire network training process. In addition, the area under the curve (AUC) of the synthetical index model (SIM), support vector machine (SVM), and multilayer perceptron (MLP) were compared and evaluated. The results indicated that the proposed model could significantly improve the accuracy of landslide susceptibility assessment. The AUC value of the proposed model was 0.31, 0.12, and 0.11 higher than that of SIM, SVM, and MLP, respectively. Therefore, the improved DBN model based on AE proposed is reliable for early landslide identification and prediction.