Geographically weighted neural network considering spatial heterogeneity for landslide susceptibility mapping: A case study of Yichang City, China

•Develop a deep learning model (GWNN) for landslide susceptibility mapping.•Compare the performance of SVM, ANN, RF, GWR and GWNN models.•The proposed model can capture the spatial heterogeneity of landslides.•Reliable landslide susceptibility map in Yichang City using the proposed model. Landslides are among the most devastating natural disasters worldwide. Landslide susceptibility mapping (LSM) is a scientific approach for assessing landslides-prone areas. Despite the use of various statistical and machine learning (ML) models to predict landslide susceptibility, few have considered the effect of spatial location on landslides. Geographically weighted regression (GWR) is a common method for modeling spatial heterogeneity, but it may not be effective in solving complex nonlinear problems. This leads to inadequate prediction accuracy for landslide susceptibility at the local scale. This study introduces a geographically weighted neural network (GWNN) model to address this problem. The GWNN model combines the advantages of GWR and neural networks (NN) to assess the effect of landslide conditioning factors on landslides. The effectiveness of the proposed method was evaluated using landslide data collected from Yichang City, Hubei Province. The results show that GWNN exhibits the higher performance (AUC = 0.788) compared with traditional ML models and GWR. Furthermore, the superior ability of GWNN is demonstrated to capture spatial heterogeneity and predict landslide susceptibility accurately at local scales. The proposed method provides a valuable reference for modeling landslide-prone areas that exhibit spatial heterogeneity.