Landslide susceptibility mapping using O-CURE and PAM clustering algorithms

Abstract

Landslide susceptibility mapping (LSM) is a crucial step during landslide assessment and environmental management. Clustering algorithms can construct effective models for LSM. However, a random selection of important parameters, inconsideration of uncertain data, noise data, and large datasets can limit the implementation of clustering in LSM, resulting in low and unreliable performance results. Thus, to address these problems, this study proposed an optimized clustering algorithm named O-CURE, which combines: the traditional Clustering Using REpresentatives algorithm (CURE), that is, efficient for large datasets and noise data, the partition influence weight (PIW)-based method to enhance the selection of sample sets and the city block distance (CIBD) for processing of the uncertain data in CURE clustering during LSM modeling. A database containing 293 landslide location samples, 213 non-landslide samples, and 7 landslide conditioning factors was prepared for the implementation and evaluation of the method. Also, a Multicollinearity analysis was conducted to select the most appropriate factors, and all the factors were acceptable for modeling. Based on O-CURE, landslide density, and the partitioning around medoids (PAM) algorithm a susceptibility map was constructed and classified into very high (33%), high (18%), moderate (24%), low (13%), and very low (12%) landslide susceptible levels. To evaluate the performance of the O-CURE model, five statistic metrics including accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, kappa, and AUC were applied. The analysis shows that O-CURE obtained accuracy = .9368, sensitivity = .9215, specificity = .9577, kappa = .8496, and AUC = .896 is an indication of high-performance capability. Also, the proposed method was compared with the CURE algorithm, three existing clustering methods, and popular supervised learning methods. From this assessment, O-CURE outperformed the other clustering methods while showing significant and more consistent performance than the supervised learning methods. Therefore, we recommend that the O-CURE model and the constructed map can be useful in assessing landslides and contribute to sustainable land-use planning and environmental management in light of future disasters.