Landslide displacement prediction based on optimized empirical mode decomposition and deep bidirectional long short-term memory network

There are two technical challenges in predicting slope deformation. The first one is the random displacement, which could not be decomposed and predicted by numerically resolving the observed accumulated displacement and time series of a landslide. The second one is the dynamic evolution of a landslide, which could not be feasibly simulated simply by traditional prediction models. In this paper, a dynamic model of displacement prediction is introduced for composite landslides based on a combination of empirical mode decomposition with soft screening stop criteria (SSSC-EMD) and deep bidirectional long short-term memory (DBi-LSTM) neural network. In the proposed model, the time series analysis and SSSC-EMD are used to decompose the observed accumulated displacements of a slope into three components, viz. trend displacement, periodic displacement, and random displacement. Then, by analyzing the evolution pattern of a landslide and its key factors triggering landslides, appropriate influencing factors are selected for each displacement component, and DBi-LSTM neural network to carry out multi-data-driven dynamic prediction for each displacement component. An accumulated displacement prediction has been obtained by a summation of each component. For accuracy verification and engineering practicability of the model, field observations from two known landslides in China, the Xintan landslide and the Bazimen landslide were collected for comparison and evaluation. The case study verified that the model proposed in this paper can better characterize the “stepwise” deformation characteristics of a slope. As compared with long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network, support vector machine (SVM), and autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model, DBi-LSTM neural network has higher accuracy in predicting the periodic displacement of slope deformation, with the mean absolute percentage error reduced by 3.063%, 14.913%, and 13.960% respectively, and the root mean square error reduced by 1.951 mm, 8.954 mm and 7.790 mm respectively. Conclusively, this model not only has high prediction accuracy but also is more stable, which can provide new insight for practical landslide prevention and control engineering.