Rainfall Induced Landslide Susceptibility Mapping Based on Bayesian Optimized Random Forest and Gradient Boosting Decision Tree Models—A Case Study of Shuicheng County, China

Abstract

Among the most frequent and dangerous natural hazards, landslides often result in huge casualties and economic losses. Landslide susceptibility mapping (LSM) is an excellent approach for protecting and reducing the risks by landslides. This study aims to explore the performance of Bayesian optimization (BO) in the random forest (RF) and gradient boosting decision tree (GBDT) model for LSM and applied in Shuicheng County, China. Multiple data sources are used to obtain 17 conditioning factors of landslides, Borderline-SMOTE and Randomundersample methods are combined to solve the imbalanced sample problem. RF and GBDT models before and after BO are adopted to calculate the susceptibility value of landslides and produce LSMs and these models were compared and evaluated using multiple validation approach. The results demonstrated that the models we proposed all have high enough model accuracy to be applied to produce LSM, the performance of the RF is better than the GBDT model without BO, while after adopting the Bayesian optimized hyperparameters, the prediction accuracy of the RF and GBDT models is improved by 1% and 7%, respectively and the Bayesian optimized GBDT model is the best for LSM in this four models. In summary, the Bayesian optimized RF and GBDT models, especially the GBDT model we proposed for landslide susceptibility assessment and LSM construction has a very good application performance and development prospects.