Effectiveness of hybrid ensemble machine learning models for landslide susceptibility analysis: Evidence from Shimla district of North-west Indian Himalayan region

The Indian Himalayan region is frequently experiencing climate change-induced landslides. Thus, landslide susceptibility assessment assumes greater significance for lessening the impact of a landslide hazard. This paper makes an attempt to assess landslide susceptibility in Shimla district of the northwest Indian Himalayan region. It examined the effectiveness of random forest (RF), multilayer perceptron (MLP), sequential minimal optimization regression (SMOreg) and bagging ensemble (B-RF, B-SMOreg, B-MLP) models. A landslide inventory map comprising 1052 locations of past landslide occurrences was classified into training (70%) and testing (30%) datasets. The site-specific influencing factors were selected by employing a multicollinearity test. The relationship between past landslide occurrences and influencing factors was established using the frequency ratio method. The effectiveness of machine learning models was verified through performance assessors. The landslide susceptibility maps were validated by the area under the receiver operating characteristic curves (ROC-AUC), accuracy, precision, recall and F1-score. The key performance metrics and map validation demonstrated that the B-RF model (correlation coefficient: 0.988, mean absolute error: 0.010, root mean square error: 0.058, relative absolute error: 2.964, ROC-AUC: 0.947, accuracy: 0.778, precision: 0.819, recall: 0.917 and F-1 score: 0.865) outperformed the single classifiers and other bagging ensemble models for landslide susceptibility. The results show that the largest area was found under the very high susceptibility zone (33.87%), followed by the low (27.30%), high (20.68%) and moderate (18.16%) susceptibility zones. The factors, namely average annual rainfall, slope, lithology, soil texture and earthquake magnitude have been identified as the influencing factors for very high landslide susceptibility. Soil texture, lineament density and elevation have been attributed to high and moderate susceptibility. Thus, the study calls for devising suitable landslide mitigation measures in the study area. Structural measures, an immediate response system, community participation and coordination among stakeholders may help lessen the detrimental impact of landslides. The findings from this study could aid decision-makers in mitigating future catastrophes and devising suitable strategies in other geographical regions with similar geological characteristics.